Echo

How to spell echo

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce echo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does echo mean?

1. nounA sound that is reflected off a surface and heard again after the original sound.
2. verbTo repeat a sound by reflection, or to repeat what someone else has said or felt.

Echo in a sentence

• noun

  I heard an echo across the valley.

• verb

  The bare walls seem to echo every word spoken in the room.

• noun

  There's a strong echo in this cave.

• verb

  Her report tends to echo the views of her manager.

Where does echo come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek ekho, meaning simply 'a sound' or 'a reverberation', built on the same family of words that describe ringing and resounding. In Greek myth, Echo was a mountain nymph cursed so that she could only repeat the final words spoken to her, which is why her name became attached to the bouncing back of sound. Latin took the word over as echo, and English absorbed it through that Latin channel in the late 1300s. The Greek 'kh' sound was carried into the spelling as 'ch', which is exactly why the word is written with 'ch' yet pronounced with a hard 'k'. That same Greek root also lurks in modern technical words such as 'echolocation' and the chamber term 'anechoic'.

How the word is built

• echo (from Greek ekho: a sound, reverberation)