Esteem

How to spell esteem

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce esteem

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does esteem mean?

1. nounRespect and admiration felt or shown toward a person or thing.
2. verbTo respect and admire someone or something highly.

Esteem in a sentence

• noun

  The veteran teacher was held in high esteem by her colleagues.

• verb

  Colleagues esteem her judgement on difficult cases.

• noun

  Years of honest dealing earned the firm great public esteem.

• verb

  Readers esteem the author for his clear, honest prose.

Where does esteem come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word travels back to the Latin verb aestimare, which meant 'to value, to appraise, or to set a price on something'. By the late Middle Ages it had passed into Old French as estimer, carrying the sense of judging the worth of a thing or a person. English took it up in the 1400s, and the same root produced the closely related word 'estimate', which still keeps the original idea of reckoning a value or amount. Over time esteem drifted from cold appraisal toward warm regard, so that to esteem someone now means to hold them in high respect rather than merely to price them. The spelling trap lives in the double 'e' in the middle and the single 'e' at the start: writers who hear it as 'es-TEEM' sometimes forget that the long vowel is written 'ee'.

How the word is built

• esteem (from Latin aestimare: to value or appraise); a single Romance root borrowed whole, not built from a separable prefix and suffix in English