Awe

How to spell awe

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce awe

What does awe mean?

1. nounA feeling of reverential wonder and respect, sometimes mixed with fear, at something vast or powerful.
2. verbTo fill someone with reverential wonder or respect.

Awe in a sentence

• noun

  The tourists stood in awe before the towering cathedral.

• verb

  The vast night sky never fails to awe the campers.

• noun

  The sheer scale of the canyon filled the hikers with awe.

• verb

  Grand monuments can awe even the most seasoned traveller.

Where does awe come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Awe traces back to the Old Norse word agi, which meant 'terror' or 'dread', and it reinforced a closely related native English word, the Old English ege, meaning 'fear' or 'terror'. In its earliest English use, around the 1200s, awe really did mean a kind of frightened dread, especially the fear felt before God or a powerful ruler. Over the centuries the sense softened from raw fear toward the modern blend of wonder, reverence, and respect that can still carry a faint shiver of the original dread. The same root survives in the everyday word 'awful', which once simply meant 'full of awe' or 'awe-inspiring' before it drifted to mean merely 'very bad'. The tiny spelling is a trap precisely because it is so short: just three letters with a silent 'w' and a final 'e', and in non-rhotic British speech it sounds identical to 'or', 'oar', and 'ore'.

How the word is built

• awe (from Old Norse agi: terror, dread), a single Germanic root word with no affixes