Chair

How to spell chair

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chair

What does chair mean?

1. nounA piece of furniture for one person to sit on, typically with a back and four legs.
2. nounThe person who presides over a meeting, committee, or organisation.
3. verbTo preside over a meeting or committee as its leader.

Chair in a sentence

• noun

  She pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.

• noun

  The committee chair called the meeting to order.

• verb

  She agreed to chair the budget meeting next week.

• noun

  The office ordered a new ergonomic chair for his desk.

• noun

  She was elected chair of the housing association.

• verb

  He will chair the panel during the conference.

Where does chair come from?

Language of origin: French

The word descends ultimately from the Greek kathedra, which literally meant 'a seat' or 'a bench', built from kata 'down' and hedra 'a seat' (the same hedra found in the geometry term 'polyhedron'). Latin borrowed it as cathedra, the seat of office occupied by a bishop or teacher, a sense that survives in the word 'cathedral', meaning the church that houses a bishop's chair. From there it passed into Old French as chaiere, which English took up around the 1200s as 'chaere' or 'chayre', gradually smoothing into the modern spelling. The 'ai' clump comes straight from that French form, which is why an everyday object ends up with a slightly French-looking vowel pair. By the 1600s the word had also come to mean the seat of authority a person occupies when presiding over a meeting, giving us both the noun for an official and the verb for running the session.

How the word is built

• chair (from Latin cathedra: seat, via Old French chaiere)