Amber

How to spell amber

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce amber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does amber mean?

1. nounA hard, translucent fossilised tree resin, or the warm yellowish-brown colour resembling it.
2. nounThe middle light of a traffic signal, shown between green and red as a warning to stop.

Amber in a sentence

• The museum displayed an insect trapped inside a lump of amber.

• The lights changed to amber just as the bus reached the junction.

• The late afternoon sun turned the whole room a soft amber.

• Drivers are meant to slow down on amber rather than speed through it.

Where does amber come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word traces back to the Arabic 'anbar', which originally named ambergris, the waxy, fragrant secretion of the sperm whale that was prized in perfume and medicine. It travelled into Medieval Latin as 'ambar' and then into Old French as 'ambre', and English picked it up in the late 1300s. Curiously, the meaning drifted: people began applying the same name to the golden, translucent fossil resin we know today, perhaps because both substances were rare, valuable, and washed up along coasts. To keep the two apart, the whale product came to be called 'ambergris', literally 'grey amber', while plain amber settled on the hardened tree resin and, by extension, its warm yellowish-brown colour. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, which makes it one of the gentler words to write despite its exotic Arabic ancestry.

How the word is built

• amber (single root, from Arabic 'anbar': originally ambergris, later fossil resin)