Dwell

How to spell dwell

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dwell

What does dwell mean?

1. verbTo live in or occupy a particular place.
2. verbTo think, speak, or write about something at length, often more than is helpful.

Dwell in a sentence

• Thousands of families dwell in the older part of the city.

• Try not to dwell on past mistakes when planning the budget.

• The species tends to dwell near freshwater streams.

• The report should dwell less on theory and more on practical steps.

Where does dwell come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dwell comes from the Old English verb dwellan, which originally meant 'to lead astray', 'to hinder', or 'to deceive'. Over time the sense softened from misleading someone to merely delaying or holding back, and from there to 'to tarry' or 'to linger in a place'. By the Middle Ages the everyday meaning had settled into 'to remain' and then 'to live or reside somewhere', which is how we mostly use it today. The word has Germanic roots and is related to the Old Norse dvelja, meaning 'to delay' or 'to stay', a reminder that the idea of pausing and the idea of living somewhere were once the same notion. The figurative phrase 'to dwell on something', meaning to keep thinking or talking about it, preserves that old flavour of lingering and refusing to move on. Because it is a short, native English word, the only real spelling point is the doubled final l in the base form.

How the word is built

• dwell (single Old English root meaning to remain or linger); no prefix or suffix