Blood

How to spell blood

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce blood

What does blood mean?

1. nounThe red fluid that circulates through the body, carrying oxygen and nutrients.
2. nounFamily relationship, ancestry, or inherited descent.

Blood in a sentence

• The nurse drew a small sample of blood for the lab.

• The two cousins are related by blood on their mother's side.

• A paper cut released a single drop of blood.

• The estate had stayed in the same blood line for three centuries.

Where does blood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Blood is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English blod, the term for the red fluid that circulates through the body. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form blodam, which is also the ancestor of the German Blut, the Dutch bloed, and the Swedish blod, marking it as part of the core inherited vocabulary rather than a later borrowing. Scholars connect the Germanic root to ideas of swelling or bubbling up, which suits a liquid that wells out of a wound. Over the centuries the meaning broadened far beyond the physical fluid: by medieval times it carried strong senses of family lineage and inherited descent, as in being of noble blood. The spelling trap is that the double letter o is pronounced as a short uh sound rather than the long oo it suggests, a leftover of vowel shifts that left the old spelling stranded against the changed pronunciation.

How the word is built

• blod (Old English: the fluid in veins and arteries) with no affixes; a single native root