Dream

How to spell dream

5 letters · 1 syllable

4 of the 38 people asked to spell dream in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce dream

What does dream mean?

1. nounA series of images, thoughts, or sensations occurring in the mind during sleep.
2. verbTo experience images during sleep, or to imagine and hope for something deeply.
3. nounA cherished ambition, hope, or ideal that one longs to achieve.

Dream in a sentence

• noun

  She woke at dawn unable to remember a single dream.

• verb

  She likes to dream about retiring somewhere warm.

• noun

  Owning a small bakery had always been her lifelong dream.

• noun

  The strange dream stayed with him all through breakfast.

• verb

  Young athletes often dream of winning a medal one day.

• noun

  Saving every month brought the dream of a new home closer.

Where does dream come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a deeply Germanic word with a surprising twist in its history. In Old English the form 'dream' actually meant 'joy', 'mirth', or 'music', and there is no clear written evidence that it carried the modern sense of a sleeping vision at that early stage. The sense we use today, a sequence of images experienced during sleep, seems to come from a related Germanic root preserved in words like Old Norse 'draumr' and Old Saxon 'drom', meaning exactly that kind of vision. Scholars still debate whether the joy meaning and the vision meaning were originally the same word or two close cousins that merged, which is why some dictionaries flag the early history as uncertain. The modern 'sleeping vision' meaning became firmly established in English during the Middle English period, around the 1200s and 1300s. The spelling stays mercifully simple: the long 'ee' sound is written with the 'ea' pair, the same pattern seen in 'cream' and 'stream'.

How the word is built

• dream (single Germanic root; no prefix or suffix)