Bump

How to spell bump

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bump

What does bump mean?

1. verbTo knock or collide against something, usually with a dull jolt.
2. nounA raised swelling on the skin or a small lump on a surface.

Bump in a sentence

• verb

  In the dark hallway it is easy to bump into the furniture.

• noun

  A small bump rose on his forehead after the fall.

• verb

  Try not to bump the table while the soup is so full.

• noun

  The car slowed for a speed bump near the school.

Where does bump come from?

Language of origin: Other

Bump is one of those words English seems to have invented by ear rather than borrowing from a tidy ancestor. It surfaces in the late 1500s and is generally regarded as imitative, an echoic coinage meant to capture the dull, heavy sound made when one solid thing knocks against another. Because it was built from sound rather than from a documented foreign root, its earliest history is genuinely murky; some scholars suspect a kinship with Scandinavian words for a thud or a blow, while others treat it as a homegrown formation. The same imitative impulse gave English a cluster of similar low, blunt-sounding words such as thump, lump and clump, all sharing that closing -ump that suggests something solid and heavy. From the idea of a knocking collision it spread naturally to mean the raised swelling such a knock leaves behind, which is why the word covers both the action and the lump it produces.

How the word is built

• bump (a single imitative root; no prefix or suffix)