Darn

How to spell darn

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce darn

What does darn mean?

1. verbTo repair a hole in fabric by stitching thread back and forth across the gap.
2. interjectionA mild exclamation of annoyance, used as a polite substitute for a stronger word.
3. adverbUsed informally to emphasise an adjective or statement, meaning very or extremely.

Darn in a sentence

• verb

  She sat by the lamp to darn the hole in her woollen sock.

• interjection

  Darn, the bus pulled away just as I reached the stop.

• adverb

  The coffee here is darn good, and the prices are fair.

• verb

  My grandmother could darn a frayed jumper so neatly the repair was invisible.

• interjection

  Darn, I left my umbrella on the train again.

• adverb

  It was darn cold on the platform this morning.

Where does darn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb meaning 'to mend a hole in cloth by weaving thread across it' appears in English in the early 1600s, and its origin is genuinely murky. The most favoured explanation traces it to a dialectal English word 'dern', from the Old English dyrnan, which meant 'to hide or conceal', the idea being that a neat repair hides the hole; some lexicographers instead connect it to a regional French verb 'darner', 'to mend'. Quite separately, the mild oath 'darn' arose in American English in the late 1700s as a polite, minced substitute for 'damn', a way to swear without quite swearing, and from that the intensifier 'darn good' and 'darn cold' later grew. The two strands look identical on the page but came together by coincidence rather than shared ancestry. Because the word is short and phonetically plain, its spelling causes little trouble, though the silent etymology behind it is more tangled than the four letters suggest.

How the word is built

• darn (single root; mending sense possibly from Old English dyrnan 'to hide/conceal'; exclamation sense a minced form of 'damn')