Gaze
verbTo look steadily and intently at something, often in wonder or thought.
How to spell gaze
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce gaze
What does gaze mean?
- verbTo look steadily and intently at something, often in wonder or thought.
- nounA steady, fixed look at someone or something.
Gaze in a sentence
-
verb
From the balcony she liked to gaze at the city lights.
-
noun
He met her steady gaze across the crowded room.
-
verb
Tired commuters gaze blankly out of the train window.
-
noun
The photographer held the model under a long gaze.
Where does gaze come from?
Language of origin: Old Norse
Gaze entered English in the late 1300s as a Middle English verb meaning to look long and steadily, and its origins are not fully settled. The most widely accepted view links it to a Scandinavian source, comparing it with the Old Swedish and dialectal Norwegian word gasa, which meant to stare or to gape. From the start it carried a sense of fixed, absorbed looking rather than a quick glance, the kind of staring done in wonder, longing, or deep attention. The noun, meaning a steady look, grew out of the verb a couple of centuries later. Because the word is short and the vowel sound is long, the spelling trap is simply remembering the silent final -e and the single z, since the related staring word leaves little to grip onto by sound alone.
How the word is built
- gaze (single root verb/noun; no prefix or suffix)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.