Cushion

How to spell cushion

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cushion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cushion mean?

1. nounA soft padded bag or pad used for sitting on, leaning against, or making something more comfortable.
2. verbTo soften or lessen the effect of something unpleasant, such as a shock or a loss.

Cushion in a sentence

• noun

  She plumped the cushion before placing it back on the sofa.

• verb

  The savings account helped to cushion the family against sudden costs.

• noun

  The chair was hard, so he added a thick cushion to the seat.

• verb

  Thick packaging will cushion the parcel during shipping.

Where does cushion come from?

Language of origin: French

Cushion came into English around 1300 from Anglo-Norman cuisshin and Old French coissin or cussin, meaning a soft pad to sit, kneel, or lean on. These French forms trace back to a Vulgar Latin word reconstructed as coxinum, which many scholars connect to the Latin coxa, meaning 'hip' or 'thigh', the very part of the body a cushion was made to support; others link it instead to culcita, a Latin word for a mattress or stuffed pad. The sense travelled smoothly from the literal padded seat to the figurative idea of anything that softens a blow or absorbs shock, a meaning common by the 1500s. The spelling trap lives in the middle and end: the soft sound is written with the unexpected -sh- and the closing -ion behaves nothing like a Latin -ation ending, so writers often grope for 'cushon' or 'cushen'. Keeping the French-derived 'shi' cluster in mind, as in 'cush-ion', helps fix it.

How the word is built

• cushion (from Old French coissin: a padded seat support); single root, no separable prefix or suffix in modern English