Brother

How to spell brother

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce brother

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does brother mean?

1. nounA male who shares one or both parents with another person.
2. nounA man regarded as a fellow member of a group, order, or community.

Brother in a sentence

• Her younger brother borrowed the car without asking.

• Each brother in the order took a vow of silence at dawn.

• My brother and I split the cost of our parents' anniversary dinner.

• The union welcomed every new brother at the monthly meeting.

Where does brother come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Brother is one of the oldest words in English, descending directly from Old English brōþor, the everyday term for a male sibling. It belongs to a very ancient family of kinship words shared across the Indo-European languages, traceable back to a reconstructed root bhrater, which carried the same plain meaning of 'brother'. Close relatives appear all over Europe, from Latin frater (source of 'fraternal' and 'fraternity') to German Bruder and Dutch broeder, all pointing to a single shared ancestor. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the -th- in the middle and the -er at the end, which matches how the word is actually said. Beyond blood relations, English broadened it early on to cover members of a religious order or fellow members of a group, giving us monks who are 'brothers' and the idea of brotherhood. The persistent spelling difficulty is small: the unstressed -er ending and the soft -th- can briefly make a writer pause, but the word is otherwise wholly regular.

How the word is built

• broth- (from Old English brōþor: male sibling)
• -er (agent/kinship ending)