Depth

How to spell depth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce depth

What does depth mean?

1. nounThe distance from the top or surface of something down to its bottom, or the distance from front to back.
2. nounThe extent of complexity, intensity, or seriousness of something such as knowledge, feeling, or detail.

Depth in a sentence

• The diver checked the depth of the water before jumping in.

• Her report showed real depth of research and careful analysis.

• The shelf was too shallow because it lacked the depth to hold the box.

• The actor brought surprising depth to an otherwise simple role.

Where does depth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Depth comes from the Old English adjective dēop, meaning 'deep' or 'extending far down or far in', a native Germanic word with relatives in Dutch diep and German tief. Curiously, the noun depth is not recorded in Old English itself; the older abstract noun was dēopnes, our 'deepness'. The form depth emerged in Middle English around the fourteenth century, built by adding the noun-forming suffix -th to deep, on the exact pattern of length from long and breadth from broad. That same -th machinery, which turns an adjective into a measurement word, also gave us strength, width and warmth. The spelling trap lives in the consonant cluster -pth, where the p sits quietly between the vowel and the th and is easy to drop when writing quickly.

How the word is built

• deep (Old English dēop: extending far down)
• -th (suffix forming abstract nouns of measure, as in length and breadth)