Fireman

How to spell fireman

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fireman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fireman mean?

1. nounA person employed to extinguish fires and carry out rescues.
2. nounA worker who tends a furnace or feeds fuel into the boiler of a steam engine.

Fireman in a sentence

• A fireman climbed the ladder to reach the trapped resident.

• On the old steam locomotive, the fireman shovelled coal while the driver watched the track.

• The off-duty fireman pulled two people from the burning car.

• The ship's fireman worked below deck, keeping the furnace burning through the night.

Where does fireman come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a straightforward English compound, joining 'fire' and 'man', both of which are native Old English words. 'Fire' descends from the Old English fyr, meaning flame or burning, while 'man' comes from mann, which in early English simply meant a person or human being before it narrowed toward 'adult male'. The compound first appears in the 1650s, but its earliest sense was not the rescuer we picture today; it described someone who tended a fire, that is, a stoker who fed coal into a furnace or the boiler of a steam engine. The modern meaning of a person employed to extinguish fires grew up alongside organised fire brigades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because both halves are everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the compound holds no real spelling trap, though modern usage increasingly favours the gender-neutral 'firefighter'.

How the word is built

• fire (a blaze, from Old English fyr)
• man (an adult male, from Old English mann)