Cough

How to spell cough

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cough

What does cough mean?

1. verbTo expel air forcefully and noisily from the lungs through the throat.

Cough in a sentence

• The thick dust made him cough all afternoon.

• Smoke from the fire made the whole class cough.

Where does cough come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Middle English coughen, an imitative or echoic formation that tried to capture the harsh, scraping sound a person makes when clearing the throat. It is related to the Dutch kuchen, meaning 'to cough lightly', and to the older German keuchen, 'to gasp or breathe heavily', all of them springing from the same family of sound-mimicking words in the West Germanic languages. The Old English form is thought to have been something like cohhian, again built purely on the noise itself rather than on any earlier idea. The puzzling spelling is the real trap: the modern 'ough' cluster preserves a Middle English sound, an 'h' once pronounced like the rough Scottish 'ch' in 'loch', that has since softened to an 'f' sound while the old letters stayed frozen in place. That is why 'cough' looks nothing like it sounds and shares its odd 'ough' ending with the unrelated rough, tough, and trough.

How the word is built

• cough (imitative root, no affixes)