Bother

How to spell bother

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bother

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bother mean?

1. verbTo trouble, annoy, or take the effort to do something.
2. nounMinor trouble, effort, or fuss involved in doing something.

Bother in a sentence

• verb

  Please do not bother the staff during the lunch rush.

• noun

  Fixing the leak turned out to be more bother than it was worth.

• verb

  He did not bother to reply to the email until the next morning.

• noun

  She went to a lot of bother to organise the surprise party.

Where does bother come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

Bother first appears in English in the early 1700s, and it owes its early popularity to Irish writers such as Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, which is why many scholars link it to an Irish source. The most widely accepted suggestion is the Irish word bodhar, meaning 'deaf' and by extension 'confused' or 'troubled', so that to be bothered originally carried the sense of having one's head muddled or filled with noise. The earliest English forms were sometimes spelled 'bodder' or 'pother', and the shifting spelling reflects how new and informal the word was at the time. Over the eighteenth century it settled into the steady sense of causing minor trouble or annoyance, and as a noun it came to mean a small amount of effort or fuss. Because its roots are spoken and colloquial rather than learned and Latin, the spelling simply mirrors the sound, with the soft 'th' written as -th- before the final -er.

How the word is built

• bother (single root, of uncertain origin; no separable prefix or suffix)