Brood

How to spell brood

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brood

What does brood mean?

1. verbTo dwell unhappily and at length on a worry or grievance.
2. nounA group of young animals, especially birds, hatched or cared for at one time.

Brood in a sentence

• verb

  He tends to brood over small mistakes long after everyone else has forgotten them.

• noun

  The hen kept her entire brood close to the henhouse during the storm.

• verb

  Try not to brood about the interview until you hear back from them.

• noun

  A fresh brood of chicks appeared in the barn this spring.

Where does brood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending from the Old English brod, which meant the offspring hatched at one time or the act of hatching itself. It belongs to a family of Germanic words tied to warmth and incubation, and it is closely related to the verb 'breed' and to the warmth-word that gives us 'broth', all sharing a sense of something kept warm. The original idea was thoroughly literal: the clutch of chicks a hen warmed beneath her. By the seventeenth century the word had taken on its familiar figurative use, in which a person 'broods' by sitting heavily over a worry the way a bird sits over eggs. The spelling keeps the double 'oo' throughout, which is the main thing to watch, since the word sounds exactly like 'brewed' but has no shared history with brewing.

How the word is built

• brood (from Old English brod: offspring, hatching), a single Germanic root with no affixes