Bathe

How to spell bathe

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bathe

What does bathe mean?

1. verbTo wash or soak something, or oneself, by immersing it in water or another liquid.
2. verbTo cover or flood something with light, colour, or warmth, as if immersing it.

Bathe in a sentence

• The nurse told him to bathe the wound in warm salt water twice a day.

• At sunset the low rays would bathe the whole valley in a soft golden glow.

• On hot afternoons the children would bathe in the shallow river near the farm.

• Spotlights bathe the stage in warm amber before the band walked on.

Where does bathe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English bathian, meaning 'to wash or immerse in water', a verb built on the noun bæth, which gave us the modern word 'bath'. The whole family traces back to a Germanic root connected with warmth and heat, since early bathing was strongly associated with warm springs and heated water rather than a quick cold rinse. The verb and the noun split apart in both sound and spelling: the noun 'bath' keeps a short vowel and a hard, unvoiced 'th', while the verb 'bathe' lengthened its vowel and softened the 'th', and that long vowel is exactly why a silent 'e' was added to the end. Related words such as the German Bad (bath) and the spa resorts named with the element '-baden' share the same ancestry. The spelling trap lives entirely in that final 'e', which carries no sound of its own yet completely changes how the word is read and said.

How the word is built

• bath (Old English bath: an immersion in water)
• -e (the silent e that signals the long 'a' vowel and the soft, voiced 'th')