Bee

How to spell bee

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bee

What does bee mean?

1. nounA flying insect with a furry body that collects nectar and pollen and can produce honey.
2. nounA gathering of people for a shared task or a friendly competition, such as a spelling or sewing event.

Bee in a sentence

• A bee landed on the lavender and crawled into the flower.

• She won the school spelling bee by spelling a six-syllable word.

• The gardener was stung by a bee while pruning the roses.

• The neighbours organised a quilting bee to finish the blanket before winter.

Where does bee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bee comes straight from the Old English word bēo, the name for the familiar honey-making insect, and it has close relatives across the older Germanic languages, such as Old High German bia and Old Norse by. The original sense was simply the buzzing, stinging insect that gathers nectar, and that meaning has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years. The much later sense of a social gathering for shared work or competition (as in a quilting bee or a spelling bee) appeared in American English in the 1700s, and its origin is genuinely uncertain; the popular idea that it likens busy neighbours to a hive of bees is appealing but unproven, and some scholars instead link it to a dialect word for help or a favour. The spelling trap is small but real, because bee sounds exactly like the verb be, and the doubled letter ee is what marks the insect on the page. Keeping the two letters in mind is the simplest way to avoid writing the verb by mistake.

How the word is built

• bee (a single root word from Old English bēo, with no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like bee

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

• be: To exist, to occupy a state or condition, or to serve as a link between a subject and its description.