Genie
nounA spirit, often pictured living in a lamp or bottle, that grants wishes to whoever frees it.
How to spell genie
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce genie
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does genie mean?
- nounA spirit, often pictured living in a lamp or bottle, that grants wishes to whoever frees it.
Genie in a sentence
-
The children begged for a story about a genie trapped inside a brass lamp.
-
In the cartoon, rubbing the lamp released a genie who offered three wishes.
Where does genie come from?
Language of origin: French
This word arrived in English in the early 1700s from the French génie, which itself came from the Latin genius, the name for a guardian spirit thought to attend a person from birth. The Latin genius is rooted in the verb gignere, meaning 'to beget' or 'to bring into being', so the original idea was of a spirit tied to one's birth and fortune. When French translators of the Arabic tales known as the Thousand and One Nights needed a word for the Arabic jinnī, a magical spirit, they reached for génie because it sounded so similar and already carried a supernatural flavour. English readers then borrowed génie as 'genie', and the lamp-dwelling wish-granter of the stories fused permanently with the older Roman notion of a personal spirit. That double ancestry is why the spelling looks French and gentle rather than matching the Arabic-derived 'jinn', and the soft -ie ending is the part writers most often second-guess.
How the word is built
- genie (a single borrowed root from French génie; not built from a prefix, root, and suffix in English)
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.