Abyss

How to spell abyss

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce abyss

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does abyss mean?

1. nounA deep or seemingly bottomless chasm, gap, or void.

Abyss in a sentence

• The climbers stared down into the dark abyss below the ledge.

• After losing the contract, the company slid toward financial abyss.

Where does abyss come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek abyssos, an adjective that literally meant 'bottomless'. It was built from the negative prefix a-, meaning 'without', joined to byssos, meaning 'bottom' or 'depth', so the whole word described something that had no floor at all. Greek-speaking writers used it for the unfathomable deep, and it passed into Late Latin as abyssus, where it often referred to the great deep waters or the underworld of biblical imagery. English picked it up through Old French and Church Latin in the 1300s, at first in religious texts describing the bottomless pit. The double letters that trip writers up, the single b and the double s, come straight from that Greek byssos root, so remembering 'a' plus 'byss' helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• a- (Greek 'without')
• byss (from Greek byssos 'bottom, depth')
• -s