Fountain

How to spell fountain

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fountain

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fountain mean?

1. nounA structure that sends a jet or stream of water into the air, often as a decorative feature.

Fountain in a sentence

• The tourists tossed coins into the marble fountain in the square.

• The office lobby has a small fountain that trickles all day.

Where does fountain come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from the Old French fontaine, which in turn came from the Late Latin fontana, a feminine form of the adjective fontanus meaning 'of a spring'. The ultimate root is the Latin noun fons (in its inflected stem font-), which literally meant a natural spring or the source from which water flows. English picked the word up in the 1400s, at first describing a natural spring or wellhead before it shifted to mean the ornamental, man-made jets of water we picture today. The same Latin root still bubbles up in 'font', the basin that holds water at a church, and in the figurative phrase 'a fount of knowledge'. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the unstressed final syllable sounds like a plain '-en', but it is actually written '-ain', a fossil of that French fontaine.

How the word is built

• fount- (from Latin fons, fontis: a spring or source of water)
• -ain (noun suffix, via Old French -aine)