Feel

How to spell feel

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce feel

What does feel mean?

1. verbTo perceive or experience something through touch, the senses, or emotion.
2. nounThe quality of something as perceived by touch, or the general impression it gives.

Feel in a sentence

• verb

  After the long flight she began to feel exhausted.

• noun

  The leather seats gave the car a luxurious feel.

• verb

  You can feel the rough texture of the stone with your fingertips.

• noun

  This old café has a warm, welcoming feel.

Where does feel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb felan, meaning 'to touch, perceive, or sense', and it traces back to a West Germanic root shared with the Dutch voelen and the German fuhlen, both of which still mean 'to feel'. Some scholars connect that Germanic stem to an even older Indo-European root suggesting the flat of the hand or the act of touching, which fits the word's earliest meaning of perceiving something physically. Over the centuries the sense broadened well beyond the skin: by the Middle Ages it covered perceiving with any of the senses, and later it stretched to emotions and intuitions, so that today we feel cold, feel sad, and feel sure. The spelling settled with the doubled 'ee' representing the long vowel, a pattern English uses in many native words such as 'keep', 'seed', and 'sleep'. Because it is such an ancient everyday word, its form has stayed remarkably stable, and the main trap is simply remembering the double 'e' rather than a single one.

How the word is built

• feel (from Old English felan: to perceive by touch)