Bread
nounA staple food made from flour and water, mixed into dough and baked.
How to spell bread
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce bread
What does bread mean?
- nounA staple food made from flour and water, mixed into dough and baked.
- nounAn informal term for money or earnings.
Bread in a sentence
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She sliced the fresh bread and spread it with butter.
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He took the extra shift to earn a bit more bread for the holiday.
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The bakery sells sourdough bread every morning.
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That side gig brings in decent bread each month.
Where does bread come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Bread comes from the Old English word bread, which originally meant a 'piece', 'bit', or 'morsel' of food rather than the loaf we picture today. It is closely related to similar Germanic words such as Old Norse brauth and German Brot, all pointing back to a root tied to brewing, leavening, or fermenting, the very process that makes dough rise. Curiously, the older Old English word for the baked loaf was hlaf, the ancestor of modern 'loaf', and over time bread quietly took over as the general term. By the Middle English period it had settled firmly into its current meaning of baked dough. The spelling keeps the 'ea' vowel pair even though it is pronounced as a short 'e', which is exactly what makes it a perfect homophone with 'bred', the past tense of 'breed'.
How the word is built
- bread (single root from Old English bread; no prefix or suffix)
Words that sound like bread
They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.
- bred: Past tense and past participle of breed: raised or produced offspring, especially animals selected for particular qualities.
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