Bone

How to spell bone

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bone

What does bone mean?

1. nounAny of the hard pieces of tissue that make up the skeleton of a human or animal.
2. verbTo remove the bones from meat or fish before cooking.

Bone in a sentence

• noun

  The x-ray showed a small crack in the bone.

• verb

  The chef will bone the chicken thighs before grilling them.

• noun

  The dog buried its bone in the garden.

• verb

  Ask the fishmonger to bone the trout for you.

Where does bone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English ban, which meant exactly what it means today: the hard tissue that forms a skeleton. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins such as the Dutch been and the German Bein, though in those languages the related word often drifted toward meaning 'leg'. The English spelling shifted over the centuries from ban to bon and finally to the modern bone, with the long vowel sound that the silent final 'e' now signals. The word has stayed remarkably stable in meaning for well over a thousand years, and many vivid expressions grew from it, such as 'bone dry' and 'to feel something in your bones'. The verb sense, meaning to remove the bones from meat or fish, developed naturally from the noun.

How the word is built

• bone (from Old English ban: bone, the hard tissue of the skeleton)