Brand

How to spell brand

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brand

What does brand mean?

1. nounA name, design, or identity that distinguishes a company's product from its competitors.
2. verbTo mark with a hot iron, or to label someone or something with a lasting reputation.

Brand in a sentence

• noun

  The supermarket's own brand costs far less than the national one.

• verb

  Ranchers still brand their cattle to prove ownership.

• noun

  Loyal customers will pay extra for a trusted brand.

• verb

  One mistake can brand a young worker as unreliable for years.

Where does brand come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English brand or brond, which meant 'fire', 'flame', or a 'burning piece of wood' such as a torch. It is a native Germanic word, closely related to the verb 'burn' and to the same root that gives German Brand 'fire' and 'blaze'. Because cattle and goods were once marked by pressing a heated iron into them, the word drifted from the fire itself to the scorched mark it left behind. By the seventeenth century that mark also stood for ownership and identity, and by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had grown into the commercial sense of a maker's name or trademark. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple and unchanged for over a thousand years, which is why the modern marketing buzzword and the old word for a flaming log are literally the same four-letter root.

How the word is built

• brand (a single Old English root: fire, burning, a mark made by burning); no prefix or suffix