Earth

How to spell earth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce earth

What does earth mean?

1. nounThe planet on which we live, the third from the sun.
2. nounThe substance of the ground; soil or loose dirt.
3. nounThe safety connection that carries stray electrical current harmlessly into the ground.

Earth in a sentence

• Photographs of earth taken from orbit show vast blue oceans.

• She pressed the seedlings gently into the damp earth.

• The electrician checked that the appliance had a proper earth before fitting the plug.

• The moon takes about a month to circle earth.

• The digger piled loose earth beside the trench.

• A faulty earth can leave the metal casing dangerously live.

Where does earth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Earth descends from the Old English word eorthe, which meant the soil, the ground underfoot, and by extension the whole inhabited world. It belongs to a broad Germanic family, with close relatives in the Dutch aarde and the German Erde, all tracing back to a common Germanic root that simply named the ground. For most of its life the word referred to the physical land or dry soil rather than the globe seen from space; the sense of Earth as one planet among many grew only as astronomy matured. The spelling preserves the old 'ea' digraph that once tracked a longer vowel, now flattened in modern pronunciation, which is the small trap for writers who hear a plain 'er' sound. In British usage the word also picked up a technical electrical meaning in the nineteenth century, naming the safety connection that leads stray current harmlessly into the ground.

How the word is built

• earth (whole word, from Old English eorthe meaning the ground or soil)