Brain

How to spell brain

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brain

What does brain mean?

1. nounThe organ inside the skull that controls thought, memory, and the body; by extension, a person's intelligence.
2. verbTo hit someone hard on the head, often used informally or as an exaggerated threat.

Brain in a sentence

• noun

  The scan showed no damage to her brain after the fall.

• verb

  She warned that a falling tile could brain a passer-by below.

• noun

  A good night of sleep helps the brain process the day's events.

• verb

  The low beam could brain anyone who forgets to duck.

Where does brain come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English bragen or brægen, the term Anglo-Saxons used for the soft grey organ inside the skull. It belongs to a small Germanic family, with close cousins in the Old Frisian brein and the Middle Low German bregen, all pointing back to a shared West Germanic root. Some scholars connect it more distantly to a Greek word, brekhmos, meaning the front part of the head, though that link is debated. The spelling settled with the 'ai' vowel during the Middle English period, which is why the modern word looks and sounds like 'rain' and 'train'. Over the centuries the literal organ sense broadened to cover intelligence and cleverness, giving us figurative uses such as calling a smart person 'the brains' of an operation.

How the word is built

• brain (whole word, from Old English brægen: the soft organ of the skull)