Bury

How to spell bury

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bury

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bury mean?

1. verbTo place something, especially a dead body, in the ground and cover it, or to hide something from view.

Bury in a sentence

• The family chose to bury their grandmother beside her late husband.

• The dog likes to bury its favourite bone in the back garden.

Where does bury come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bury descends from the Old English verb byrgan, which meant 'to raise a mound over, to hide, or to inter the dead'. That verb came from the same Germanic root as 'borrow' and 'borough', a family built on the idea of protecting, sheltering, or concealing something safely. The original sense was less about lowering a body into the earth and more about covering or hiding it under a protective mound, which is why the word still works for hiding anything, not just corpses. The spelling is the great trap: the letter combination is written with a 'u', yet most English speakers pronounce it exactly like 'berry', a leftover of dialect mixing in Middle English when southern and western pronunciations diverged from the standard spelling. That mismatch between the written 'bury' and the spoken 'berry' is precisely why writers reach for the wrong vowel.

How the word is built

• bury (from Old English byrgan: to hide, to inter); no separable prefix or suffix

Words that sound like bury

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• berry: A small, round, soft, edible fruit that grows on a bush, vine, or bramble.