Diss

How to spell diss

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce diss

What does diss mean?

1. verbTo treat someone with contempt or to insult them, especially in an open or public way.
2. nounAn insulting or disrespectful remark aimed at someone.

Diss in a sentence

• verb

  He felt the reviewer went out of the way to diss his new album.

• noun

  Calling his cooking bland was a real diss to a trained chef.

• verb

  It is unwise to diss a colleague in front of the whole team.

• noun

  She took the comment about her accent as a deliberate diss.

Where does diss come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a clipped, informal reshaping of 'disrespect', and it carries the spelling trap of a doubled final s that the parent word never had. 'Disrespect' itself runs back to the Latin prefix dis-, meaning 'apart' or 'away', joined to respect, from respicere, literally 'to look back at' or 'to regard'. The slang form emerged in the 1980s within African American Vernacular English and the hip-hop scene of the United States, where 'to diss someone' meant to insult or belittle them publicly. Writers double the s partly to keep the short, sharp vowel sound when the word stands alone and partly to distinguish it on the page from the prefix 'dis-'. It entered mainstream dictionaries in the 1990s and is now widely understood, though still firmly casual in register.

How the word is built

• diss (clipping of 'disrespect', from Latin dis- 'apart, away'
• respect)

Words that sound like diss

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

• dis: To speak about or treat someone with disrespect or contempt; to insult.