Flax

How to spell flax

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flax

What does flax mean?

1. nounA blue-flowered plant grown for its fibre, which is spun into linen, and for its oil-rich seeds.

Flax in a sentence

• The farmer planted a field of flax for the linen mill.

• Linen thread is made by spinning the long fibres of flax.

Where does flax come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flax comes straight from the Old English word fleax, which named both the slender blue-flowered plant and the fibre taken from its stem to make linen thread. It belongs to the West Germanic family and has close cousins in Dutch vlas and German Flachs, all tracing back to a shared ancestral root that some scholars connect to the idea of plaiting or weaving, which fits a plant grown precisely to be spun into cloth. The word has stayed remarkably stable in form for well over a thousand years, never passing through French or Latin filters, which is why it kept its plain, blunt Germanic shape. The related adjective 'flaxen', describing pale golden hair the colour of dressed flax fibre, grew up alongside it. Because the word is short and phonetic, its spelling holds no real surprise: the final sound is simply written as the letters that match it.

How the word is built

• flax (a single native root; from Old English fleax 'flax, linen', with no prefix or suffix)