Among

How to spell among

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce among

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does among mean?

1. prepositionSurrounded by, in the middle of, or in the company of a group of things or people.

Among in a sentence

• The missing keys turned up among the papers on the desk.

• She felt completely at ease among her colleagues.

Where does among come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Old English onmang, a contraction of the phrase on gemang, which literally meant 'in a crowd' or 'in a mingling'. The element gemang was a noun built on the verb mengan, meaning 'to mix' or 'to mingle', so the original idea was of something set in the middle of a mixed group. Over the centuries the long phrase compressed into a single short preposition, and the older variant 'amongst' developed by adding a genitive -s plus a -t, much as 'amid' produced 'amidst'. The same Germanic root for mixing survives in the modern word 'mingle'. The spelling trap is simply that it ends in a plain -g and has only one 'o', never the doubled vowel some writers expect.

How the word is built

• a- (in, on, from Old English on)
• -mong (from gemang: a mingling, crowd)