Gardener

How to spell gardener

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce gardener

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gardener mean?

1. nounA person who tends and cultivates a garden, whether as a job or a hobby.

Gardener in a sentence

• The gardener pruned the roses before the first frost.

• We hired a gardener to maintain the lawn and borders each week.

Where does gardener come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from 'garden' plus the agent suffix '-er', which marks the person who performs an action. 'Garden' itself arrived in English from Old North French 'gardin' (Modern French 'jardin'), meaning an enclosed piece of cultivated ground. That word traces back to a Germanic root meaning an enclosure or fence, the same family that gave us 'yard' and the second half of 'orchard'. The link to fencing is the key: a garden was originally land that had been hedged or walled in, and the 'gardener' was the keeper of that enclosed plot. English settled on the form with '-ener' in the medieval period, and the doubled middle of the word (the 'd-e-n-e-r' run) is the part writers tend to slip on, often dropping the first 'e' to write 'gardner'.

How the word is built

• garden (enclosed plot of cultivated ground)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)