Bright

How to spell bright

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bright

What does bright mean?

1. adjectiveGiving out or filled with a strong, vivid light or colour.
2. adjectiveQuick to learn or understand; intelligent.

Bright in a sentence

• The kitchen feels bright once the blinds are open.

• The manager hired a bright young analyst straight from university.

• She painted the spare room a bright shade of yellow.

• He had a bright idea for cutting the monthly costs.

Where does bright come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English beorht, which meant 'shining', 'radiant', or 'clear', and it belongs to the native Germanic core of English rather than to any borrowed classical stock. The Old English form was once pronounced with a rasping guttural sound in the middle, the same throaty noise that the spelling 'gh' was later invented to capture. Over the centuries that consonant fell silent in everyday speech, yet the written 'gh' stayed frozen in place, which is exactly why the modern spelling looks so much harder than the simple word sounds. The same buried 'gh' explains why bright rhymes neatly with light, night, and right, all of them old Germanic words that lost the same sound together. From its first meaning of literal radiance the word stretched into figurative use, so that a quick or clever person could be called bright, a sense well established by the later medieval period.

How the word is built

• bright (from Old English beorht: shining, clear); the silent -gh- preserves an old guttural sound now lost