Bruise

How to spell bruise

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bruise

What does bruise mean?

1. nounA discoloured mark on the skin caused by a blow that damages blood vessels underneath without breaking the surface.
2. verbTo injure flesh so that blood gathers beneath the skin, or to damage soft produce by impact.

Bruise in a sentence

• noun

  A dark bruise spread across her shin after she walked into the table.

• verb

  Ripe peaches bruise easily if you pack them too tightly.

• noun

  The doctor examined the bruise to check that no bone was fractured.

• verb

  A hard tackle can bruise the muscle even through padding.

Where does bruise come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word bruise descends from two roots that merged together in English. The native Old English verb brysan meant 'to crush, pound, or batter', and it blended over time with the Anglo-French bruiser (also spelled bruser), meaning 'to break or smash to pieces'. This double parentage is why the modern spelling carries the slightly awkward -ui- cluster, since the French influence reshaped the vowel that the Old English form alone would not have produced. By the late medieval period the word had narrowed from any kind of crushing or breaking to the specific sense of injuring flesh so that blood gathers under unbroken skin. The noun meaning the resulting mark grew naturally out of the verb during the 1500s. The lingering trap for writers is purely that buried -ui-: the ear hears a simple 'brooze', so the silent arrangement of vowels is what trips people up.

How the word is built

• bruis- (from Old English brysan: to crush)
• -e (silent final e)