Donor

How to spell donor

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce donor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does donor mean?

1. nounA person or organisation that gives something, such as money, blood, an organ, or property, to another.

Donor in a sentence

• The charity thanked every donor at the annual fundraising dinner.

• An anonymous donor paid for the new hospital wing.

Where does donor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb donare, meaning 'to give as a gift', which itself grew from the noun donum, plain Latin for 'a gift'. The same donum sits behind English words like 'donate' and 'pardon', the latter meaning literally to give something away by forgiving it. English took 'donor' through Anglo-French and Old French as 'donour' in the fifteenth century, originally referring in legal contexts to a person who grants property or an estate to another. Over time the sense broadened to anyone who gives, and from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it settled into the now familiar medical and charitable meanings of someone who supplies blood, organs, or money. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending, written -or rather than the -er that many agent nouns take, a clue that the word came in through Latin rather than from a native English root.

How the word is built

• don- (from Latin donare: to give)
• -or (agent noun suffix: one who does)