Drought

How to spell drought

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drought

What does drought mean?

1. nounA prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall, leading to a shortage of water.

Drought in a sentence

• The drought ruined the harvest.

• The crops failed during the drought.

Where does drought come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English drugath, meaning 'dryness' or 'a drying up', which was built on the verb drugian, 'to dry'. That stem is closely related to the everyday adjective 'dry', and the two share the same Germanic ancestry, which is why the meanings sit so close together. Over the centuries the spelling shifted considerably: the older forms ended in a softer guttural sound that Middle English writers spelled with 'gh', leaving the silent 'gh' we still carry today even though it is no longer pronounced. The modern sense, a long period without enough rain, was established by the time the word reached its present form in late Middle English. The silent 'ght' cluster, mirroring words like 'bought' and 'thought', is exactly the spot where writers stumble, since the ear hears nothing where the eye expects three letters.

How the word is built

• drug- (from Old English drugian: to dry up)
• -t (noun-forming suffix)