Dis

How to spell dis

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dis

What does dis mean?

1. verbTo speak about or treat someone with disrespect or contempt; to insult.
2. nounAn act or remark intended as an insult or sign of disrespect.

Dis in a sentence

• verb

  He would never dis a colleague in front of the whole team.

• noun

  Her offhand comment about his work felt like a deliberate dis.

• verb

  The rapper used the track to openly dis his rivals.

• noun

  The fans took the manager's silence as a dis.

Where does dis come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a slang clipping of the verb 'disrespect', itself built on the Latin-derived prefix 'dis-', which carried senses of 'apart', 'away', or 'reversal'. The fuller word 'disrespect' had existed in English since the 1600s, but the short form arose in late twentieth-century American urban speech, particularly within African American Vernacular English and early hip-hop culture of the 1980s, where to 'dis' someone meant to put them down or treat them with contempt. From spoken slang it spread quickly into print and was recorded in mainstream dictionaries by the 1990s. The spelling trap is that the word is also very commonly written 'diss' with a double s, partly to look less like the dry Latin prefix 'dis-' and to signal its punchy slang flavour; this entry treats the single-s 'dis' form. Because it began as casual speech rather than formal writing, its spelling stayed unsettled longer than most words.

How the word is built

• clipped from disrespect: dis- (the prefix meaning 'apart, away, opposite') reused as a standalone word

Words that sound like dis

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• diss: To treat someone with contempt or to insult them, especially in an open or public way.