Fresh

How to spell fresh

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fresh

What does fresh mean?

1. adjectiveRecently made, gathered, or arrived, and not stale, old, or preserved.
2. adjectiveDisrespectful or overly bold in an impudent, cheeky way.

Fresh in a sentence

• The bakery sells fresh bread every morning.

• The manager warned the new clerk not to get fresh with customers.

• She added some fresh vegetables to the salad.

• His fresh remark to the teacher earned him a detention.

Where does fresh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fresh comes from the Old English word fersc, which originally meant 'not salty' and was used to distinguish drinkable water and unpreserved food from anything cured with brine or salt. That sense was reinforced by related Germanic words, including Old High German frisc, and English speakers later absorbed influence from the Old French freis and fresche, which carried meanings like 'new', 'cool', and 'recent'. Over the centuries the meaning broadened well beyond water and food to cover anything new, clean, or recently made, and by the slang of the twentieth century it even came to mean impertinent or cheeky. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the 'sh' sound spelled exactly as you hear it, which is why almost no one trips over it. The same Germanic root survives across northern Europe, for example in the German frisch and the Dutch vers.

How the word is built

• fresh (from Old English fersc: not salt, pure)
• no affixes