Don

How to spell don

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce don

What does don mean?

1. verbTo put on an item of clothing or equipment.
2. nounA senior member or teaching fellow of a university, especially at Oxford or Cambridge.

Don in a sentence

• verb

  The surgeons don fresh gloves before every procedure.

• noun

  The college don marked the essays late into the night.

• verb

  Workers must don a hard hat before entering the site.

• noun

  As a young don, he lectured on medieval history.

Where does don come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This short word actually carries two separate histories under one spelling. As a verb meaning 'to put on', it is a worn-down contraction of the Middle English phrase 'do on', that is, to do a garment onto the body; the matching opposite 'doff' is likewise a squeeze of 'do off', and both date from around the 1300s to 1500s. As a noun, 'don' is a completely different word borrowed from Spanish and Italian, where it served as a title of respect placed before a man's name, descended from the Latin 'dominus', meaning 'lord' or 'master'. From that same Latin root English also draws 'dominate' and 'dominion', which helps explain why a 'don' came to mean an eminent or commanding figure. In British universities the title settled into the sense of a senior teaching fellow, while in popular usage it later attached to the head of a crime family. The plainness of the three-letter spelling hides this surprising double ancestry, one homegrown and one Latin by way of Spain and Italy.

How the word is built

• don (contraction of the phrase 'do on', meaning to put on)