Buzz

How to spell buzz

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce buzz

What does buzz mean?

1. verbTo make a low, continuous humming sound, like a bee or a vibrating device.
2. nounA low, continuous humming or droning sound.
3. nounA feeling of excited energy, or lively talk and rumour about something.

Buzz in a sentence

• verb

  The old fluorescent light would buzz whenever it was switched on.

• noun

  A faint buzz from the refrigerator filled the silent flat.

• noun

  There was a real buzz around the office after the merger was announced.

• verb

  A single wasp began to buzz against the kitchen window.

• noun

  The constant buzz of the bees made the orchard feel alive.

• noun

  The new restaurant created a huge buzz on social media before it even opened.

Where does buzz come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Buzz is an imitative or echoic word, meaning its very sound mimics the thing it names: the continuous low humming drone of bees, flies, or vibrating machinery. It first appeared in English in the 1500s, and writers of the period used it precisely because the doubled z and the closing hiss imitate an insect in flight. Over the centuries the sense widened well beyond insects, so that by the 1600s a buzz could describe the low murmur of many voices in a crowded room, and in the modern era it came to mean a feeling of excited energy or a wave of lively talk and rumour about something. The same imitative instinct gave English a whole family of relatives such as hum, hiss, and whir. Because the word was built from sound rather than from a Latin or Greek root, its spelling simply records that buzzing noise, with the double z that traps writers who expect a single one.

How the word is built

• buzz (imitative root reproducing a humming sound), no prefix or suffix