Distrust

How to spell distrust

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce distrust

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does distrust mean?

1. nounA feeling that someone or something cannot be relied on or believed.
2. verbTo have no confidence in someone or something; to regard as unreliable.

Distrust in a sentence

• noun

  Years of broken promises left a deep distrust of the management team.

• verb

  Investors began to distrust the figures the company published each quarter.

• noun

  Her distrust of online reviews made her research the product elsewhere.

• verb

  He learned to distrust any email that demanded his password.

Where does distrust come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word pairs the Latin-derived prefix dis-, meaning 'apart' or 'not', with the native noun 'trust', and the result is the simple idea of withheld confidence. The core word 'trust' came into English from Old Norse traust, meaning 'help, confidence, or protection', which Scandinavian settlers brought to the British Isles during the Viking age. That Norse word is related to the same Germanic root that gives us 'true' and 'truth', so trust literally rests on the notion of something firm and reliable. By the sixteenth century English speakers had bolted the prefix dis- onto trust to coin distrust, naming the deliberate opposite of that reliance. The spelling is reassuringly transparent: it is just dis plus trust, with no doubled or dropped letters to trip over, which is why the only real hazard is forgetting that there is a single s in the prefix and a separate t starting the root.

How the word is built

• dis- (negation, opposite of)
• trust (confidence, from Old Norse traust)