Breath

How to spell breath

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce breath

What does breath mean?

1. nounThe air taken into and expelled from the lungs, or a single act of taking in that air.

Breath in a sentence

• She took a deep breath before walking into the interview.

• The cold morning air left a cloud of breath in front of him.

Where does breath come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Breath comes from the Old English word brǣth, which originally meant a smell, a scent, or a rising vapour rather than the air we take into our lungs. That noun belongs to the wider Germanic family and is linked to the idea of something steaming or giving off heat, so the earliest sense was closer to 'exhalation of warm air' than to 'act of breathing'. Over the medieval period the meaning narrowed to the air drawn in and pushed out of the lungs, which is the everyday sense today. The verb 'breathe', with its silent final e and its different vowel sound, was formed from the same root, and that close pairing is exactly why writers so often swap the two: the noun breath has no e on the end, while the verb breathe does. Keeping the spelling tied to the short, clipped vowel of the noun is the simplest way to remember which form to use.

How the word is built

• breath (Old English brǣth: smell, vapour, exhalation); a noun standing on its own with no affixes