Flee

How to spell flee

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flee

What does flee mean?

1. verbTo run away quickly from danger, trouble, or an unwanted situation.

Flee in a sentence

• The family had to flee the city as the floodwaters rose.

• Many residents chose to flee the war zone with only a single suitcase.

Where does flee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flee comes from the Old English verb flēon, which meant 'to run away from danger' or 'to take to flight'. It belongs to a broad Germanic family, sharing ancestry with the Dutch vlieden and the German fliehen, all carrying the sense of escaping a threat. In the earliest English the verb was sometimes tangled up with flēogan 'to fly', since fleeing and flying both involve swift movement away, and traces of that overlap survive in the irregular past tense 'fled'. The modern spelling settled on the double 'ee' to mark the long vowel, which conveniently distinguishes it from its identical-sounding partner 'flea', the biting insect, a word that descends from an entirely separate Old English root, flēa. Remembering that flee ends like 'free' (something you become when you escape) helps keep it apart from the buggy 'flea'.

How the word is built

• flee (from Old English flēon: to run away, escape); a single-root verb with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like flee

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• flea: A tiny wingless jumping insect that feeds on the blood of animals and people.