Blaze

How to spell blaze

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce blaze

What does blaze mean?

1. nounA large, bright, strongly burning fire.
2. verbTo burn fiercely with bright flames, or to shine very brightly.
3. nounA white mark on an animal's face, or a mark cut into a tree to show a path.

Blaze in a sentence

• noun

  Firefighters battled the blaze for several hours before it was contained.

• verb

  The logs in the hearth began to blaze as soon as the kindling caught.

• noun

  The brown horse had a distinctive white blaze running down its nose.

• noun

  The dry summer made the forest blaze spread rapidly across the hills.

• verb

  The stadium lights blaze over the pitch long after the match ended.

• noun

  Each blaze on the trees marked the route back to the campsite.

Where does blaze come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English blæse, which meant a torch or a bright, leaping flame, and it traces back to a Germanic root linked to the idea of shining or burning brightly. The same family of words gave us the verb 'to blaze' for burning fiercely and the sense of dazzling brilliance, since fire and bright light were closely associated in the old meaning. A separate but related strand produced 'blaze' meaning a white patch on an animal's face or a mark cut into a tree, which comes from a Germanic word for something white or shining and arrived partly through Dutch and Low German usage. From this tree-marking sense came the familiar phrase to 'blaze a trail', that is, to cut marks showing the way for others to follow. The spelling has stayed close to its Old English form, with the simple silent final 'e' marking the long vowel, which is why it rarely trips up adult writers.

How the word is built

• blaze (from Old English blæse: a torch, a bright flame)