Dad

How to spell dad

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dad

What does dad mean?

1. nounAn informal, affectionate word for one's father.

Dad in a sentence

• My dad taught me how to change a tyre.

• Every Sunday she calls her dad to catch up.

Where does dad come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the informal nursery vocabulary that children produce naturally, where the easy repeated syllable 'da-da' is among the first sounds a baby utters. Forms like 'dad' and 'dada' have been recorded in English since at least the sixteenth century, though similar words appear independently in many unrelated languages because they share this infant origin rather than a common ancestor. Welsh 'tad' and Greek 'tata' show the same pattern, which is why linguists treat words of this kind as parallel inventions instead of borrowings. Over time 'dad' settled in as the standard affectionate everyday term for one's father, sitting alongside the more formal 'father'. Because it is so short and phonetically plain, the spelling has never wandered: it is exactly the three letters it sounds like.

How the word is built

• dad (a child's natural babbling syllable, no internal prefix or suffix)