Dance

How to spell dance

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dance

What does dance mean?

1. verbTo move rhythmically to music, typically following a set of steps.
2. nounA series of rhythmic movements to music, or a social event where people dance.

Dance in a sentence

• verb

  They like to dance together at every wedding.

• noun

  The school held its annual dance in the gymnasium.

• verb

  She learned to dance the tango during her trip to Argentina.

• noun

  He booked a slow dance with his partner before the music ended.

Where does dance come from?

Language of origin: French

Dance arrived in English in the early 1300s from the Old French verb dancier, meaning 'to dance', along with its related noun. The Old French word itself is of uncertain earlier origin, though many scholars suspect a Germanic source, possibly a Frankish root meaning 'to stretch' or 'to draw out', referring to the lining up of a row of dancers. Before this borrowing, Old English used native words for rhythmic movement, but the fashionable French term swept them aside as courtly and social dancing spread. The word soon covered both the act of moving rhythmically to music and the social gathering held for that purpose. Because the spelling kept the soft 'c' from French, the word reads with an /s/ sound, which is why it never picked up a 'k'.

How the word is built

• dance (single root, from Old French dancier 'to dance'), no separable affixes