Brit

How to spell brit

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brit

What does brit mean?

1. nounAn informal term for a person from Britain.

Brit in a sentence

• As a proud brit, she always carried teabags when travelling abroad.

• The hostel was full of backpackers, including one cheerful brit from Leeds.

Where does brit come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

In its most familiar modern use, brit is a clipped, informal form of Briton or British, a casual label for a person from Britain that became common in print during the early twentieth century. The longer ancestor, Briton, came into English through Old French Bretun and ultimately from the Latin Britto, the Roman name for the native inhabitants of the island, which itself rested on a much older Celtic name for the people and the land. There is a second, quite separate noun spelled the same way: in marine and whaling vocabulary, brit refers to the tiny young herring, sprats, or minute planktonic creatures on which whales and other fish feed; that sense is recorded from the seventeenth century and its origin is genuinely uncertain, perhaps from a regional English or Cornish dialect word. The spelling stays reassuringly simple in every sense, just four letters with a short vowel, and the only real temptation is to add a second t, as in the personal name Britt.

How the word is built

• brit (clipping of Briton / British)