Bean

How to spell bean

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bean

What does bean mean?

1. nounAn edible seed that grows in a pod, or the plant that produces it.

Bean in a sentence

• Each dried bean swelled after soaking overnight in water.

• A single coffee bean rolled off the counter and onto the floor.

Where does bean come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bean comes from the Old English word 'bean', which already meant the edible seed of certain pod-bearing plants such as the broad bean. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse 'baun', Dutch 'boon', and German 'Bohne', all pointing back to a common ancestor that named these protein-rich seeds long before the New World varieties such as the kidney and runner bean reached Europe. The original sense referred chiefly to the broad or fava bean, the only true bean known in early Britain. Over the centuries the word stretched to cover many unrelated legumes and even coffee and cocoa 'beans', which are seeds that merely resemble the shape. The main spelling trap is that bean is a homophone of 'been' for many speakers, so the everyday meaning, a seed you can eat, is the test for which one belongs in a sentence.

How the word is built

• bean (a single, unanalysable Old English root word; no prefix or suffix)