Dune

How to spell dune

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dune

What does dune mean?

1. nounA hill or ridge of sand piled up by the wind, typically near a coast or in a desert.

Dune in a sentence

• The children scrambled up the steep dune to watch the sunset.

• A fence was built to stop the dune from drifting onto the road.

Where does dune come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century from French dune, meaning a low sand hill heaped up by the wind. French had in turn borrowed it from Middle Dutch dune (modern Dutch duin), the natural term among the seafaring Low Countries for the rolling sandbanks along their flat coastlines. That Germanic word is closely related to the English word 'down', as in the grassy chalk uplands called the South Downs, since both ultimately trace back to a sense of a raised stretch of open ground. Because the word came to us through French and Dutch rather than being built from familiar English parts, it keeps a simple four-letter shape with a silent final 'e' that lengthens the vowel. The spelling rarely trips adults, but the silent 'e' is the only feature worth remembering.

How the word is built

• dune (whole root; from Dutch duin, a sand hill)