Flesh

How to spell flesh

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flesh

What does flesh mean?

1. nounThe soft muscular and fatty tissue of a human or animal body, as distinct from bone and skin.
2. verbTo give fuller form or detail to something, usually followed by 'out'.

Flesh in a sentence

• noun

  The thorn pierced the soft flesh of his thumb.

• verb

  The team met to flesh out the rough proposal before the deadline.

• noun

  The ripe peach had sweet golden flesh beneath its skin.

• verb

  She used the weekend to flesh out the bare outline of her report.

Where does flesh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flesh descends from the Old English noun flǣsc, which meant the soft muscular tissue of a body and, by extension, meat. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Dutch vlees and the German Fleisch, all tracing back to a shared West Germanic root for body tissue. The word has stayed remarkably stable in form and sense for over a thousand years, naming both the living substance of bodies and the edible meat of animals. Over time it picked up softer figurative uses, including the pulp of fruit and the warm, human pinkish colour we still call flesh tone. The spelling preserves the old 'sh' sound that in Old English was written as 'sc', so the modern 'esh' ending is simply the natural English way of writing that sound.

How the word is built

• flesh (from Old English flǣsc: soft tissue, meat), a single native root with no prefix or suffix