Flight

How to spell flight

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flight

What does flight mean?

1. nounA journey made through the air in an aircraft.
2. nounA continuous series of steps between two landings or floors.
3. nounThe act of running away or escaping from danger.

Flight in a sentence

• The early morning flight to Madrid was delayed by fog.

• His office is up one flight of stairs on the left.

• The suspect's sudden flight from the country alarmed investigators.

• She checked in two hours before her flight departed.

• Carrying the sofa up the narrow flight took both of them an hour.

• The rising rents triggered a flight of families from the city centre.

Where does flight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English flyht, meaning the action of flying through the air, which was built on the verb flēogan, 'to fly'. The same Germanic root gave us the modern verb 'fly' and the noun 'fledge', and related forms turn up across the Germanic languages, such as Dutch vlucht and German Flucht. From the literal sense of birds in the air, English extended the word to a journey made by aircraft once aeroplanes arrived in the twentieth century. A separate but tangled strand, the sense of fleeing or running away, comes from a closely related Old English noun tied to the verb flēon, 'to flee'; over time the two ideas blended into the single spelling we use now. The silent 'gh' is the fossil of an Old English sound once pronounced at the back of the throat, which is exactly why the word looks harder than it sounds.

How the word is built

• fl- (from Old English flēogan, to fly)
• -t (noun-forming suffix)