Age

How to spell age

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce age

What does age mean?

1. nounThe length of time that a person or thing has existed.
2. verbTo grow older, or to allow something to mature over time.

Age in a sentence

• noun

  The form asks for your name and age in the first section.

• verb

  The winemaker lets the red wine age in oak barrels for two years.

• noun

  The museum dated the pottery and confirmed its great age.

• verb

  Stress can age a person faster than the calendar suggests.

Where does age come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word came into English around the 1200s from the Old French aage or eage, which traced back to an unrecorded Latin form aetaticum. That in turn rested on the Latin aetas, meaning a 'period of life' or 'span of years', which itself grew from aevum, meaning 'lifetime' or 'an age'. The same aevum root quietly survives in English words such as 'eternal' and 'longevity', both of which deal with great stretches of time. Over the centuries the spelling was smoothed down from the bulky Old French forms to the short, tidy 'age' we write today. Because the word is so short and the soft 'j' sound is spelled with a familiar -ge ending, it has never posed a real spelling problem.

How the word is built

• age (from Latin aetas: period of life, lifetime)