Bane

How to spell bane

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bane

What does bane mean?

1. nounA cause of great distress, ruin, or persistent annoyance.

Bane in a sentence

• Slow internet was the bane of his working day at home.

• Unexpected bank fees became the bane of her careful monthly budget.

Where does bane come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from Old English bana, which literally meant a slayer, killer, or murderer, and by extension the cause of someone's death. It belongs to the older Germanic family alongside Old Norse bani and Old High German bano, all carrying that sense of one who deals death. For centuries it also named a deadly poison, a use that still survives fossilised in plant names such as wolfsbane, henbane, and ratsbane, where the suffix marks something fatal to wolves, hens, or rats. Over time the lethal edge softened, and from around the 1500s bane came to mean any source of ruin, harm, or persistent misery rather than literal death. Because it is a short, phonetic, native word, its spelling is straightforward; the modern sense of an ongoing nuisance is now far more common than the original meaning of an actual killer.

How the word is built

• bane (from Old English bana: slayer, killer); a single native root word with no prefix or suffix