Bunch

How to spell bunch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bunch

What does bunch mean?

1. nounA number of things growing or fastened together, or an informal group of people or items.
2. verbTo gather or crowd things closely together.

Bunch in a sentence

• noun

  She bought a bunch of bananas at the market.

• verb

  The heavy fabric tends to bunch at the waist.

• noun

  He kept the whole bunch of keys on a single ring.

• verb

  Commuters bunch near the doors during rush hour.

Where does bunch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word bunch first appears in Middle English around the 1300s, where it originally meant a swelling, a lump, or a protuberance, such as the hump on a camel's back. Its earliest origins are genuinely uncertain, though it is thought to be of native Germanic stock and may be linked to words for a knob or a bundle; some scholars connect it loosely to bunk and to the idea of something rounded and clustered together. Over time the sense shifted from a single lump to a group of similar things gathered tightly, giving us a bunch of grapes or a bunch of keys. By the later medieval period the modern meaning of a clustered collection was well established. Because the spelling closely mirrors the way the word sounds, with its plain -unch ending shared by lunch, hunch, and crunch, it has stayed remarkably stable and easy to write.

How the word is built

• bunch (single root, no analysable affixes); from Middle English bunche meaning a swelling or cluster