Bliss

How to spell bliss

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bliss

What does bliss mean?

1. nounA state of perfect happiness or intense, untroubled joy.

Bliss in a sentence

• A quiet morning with coffee and no emails is pure bliss for her.

• The first week of the holiday was a haze of warm sand and total bliss.

Where does bliss come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bliss is a genuinely native English word, descending from the Old English blīss (also spelled blīths), which meant joy, gladness, or merriment. That noun grew out of the same Germanic root that gave us blīthe, the ancestor of the modern word 'blithe' meaning carefree and cheerful, so bliss and blithe are close cousins sharing an idea of lighthearted happiness. In its earliest use bliss could describe ordinary delight as well as the perfect joy of heaven, and over the medieval period the heavenly, spiritual sense grew especially strong. The spelling settled with a doubled 's' to keep the vowel short, distinguishing it from words where a single 's' might soften the sound. Because it is one short, solid syllable with no awkward roots, it has changed remarkably little in well over a thousand years of English.

How the word is built

• bliss (a single root from Old English blīths meaning joy; the doubled -ss preserves the short vowel sound)