Ant

How to spell ant

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ant

What does ant mean?

1. nounA small social insect that lives in colonies, known for foraging and carrying loads many times its own weight.

Ant in a sentence

• A single ant carried a crumb across the kitchen counter.

• The picnic was ruined when one ant after another swarmed the jam.

Where does ant come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ant comes from the Old English word æmette, which named the same small social insect we know today. Over centuries of spoken use the word was worn down: the middle syllable collapsed, leaving the short, blunt form 'ant' by the time of Middle English. The very same æmette also gave us 'emmet', an old dialect word for ant still heard in parts of southwest England. The Germanic root behind it is thought to mean something like 'the biter off' or 'cutter', describing how the insect chews and severs material. Because the modern spelling lost so much of its original body, it ended up as one of the shortest and most regular words in English, which is why it almost never trips up writers.

How the word is built

• ant (single root; from Old English æmette, with no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like ant

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• aunt: The sister of one's mother or father, or the wife of one's uncle.