Fife

How to spell fife

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fife

What does fife mean?

1. nounA small, high-pitched flute traditionally played alongside drums in military and marching bands.

Fife in a sentence

• The museum displayed a wooden fife once carried by a regimental musician.

• He learned to play the fife before joining the marching band.

Where does fife come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word came into English in the middle of the sixteenth century from the German Pfeife, which simply meant 'pipe' and was used for any small whistling instrument. That German word descends from the same Latin source, pipare, meaning 'to chirp' or 'to peep', that also gives us the everyday English 'pipe'. English may have picked up the form partly through the French fifre, a borrowing the French themselves had taken from German-speaking Swiss mercenary musicians who marched with these shrill little flutes. The instrument earned its reputation alongside the drum in military bands, where its piercing tone carried over the noise of a march. Because the word lost the awkward German Pf- cluster, the modern spelling is reassuringly plain: just the f sounds bracketing a long i, with a silent e on the end to keep that vowel long.

How the word is built

• fife (single root, no affixes; from Germanic pfeife meaning pipe)