Get

How to spell get

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce get

What does get mean?

1. verbTo come to have or receive something; to obtain.

Get in a sentence

• She went to the shop to get some milk for the morning.

• You can get a refund if you keep the receipt.

Where does get come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word comes from the Old Norse verb geta, which meant 'to obtain', 'to reach', or 'to be able to', and it was carried into northern England by Norse settlers during the Viking age. Old English had its own close relative in the form -gietan, surviving only inside compounds such as begietan ('to acquire') and forgietan (the ancestor of 'forget'), but the borrowed Norse form is the one that won out and gave us the modern bare verb. By around 1200 'get' was established in everyday English with its broad sense of acquiring or coming into possession of something. Over the centuries it spread into an enormous range of casual uses, from 'get up' to 'get going', which is why it is one of the most flexible verbs in the language. The spelling is short and phonetic, so the only real trap is the doubling of the final consonant before suffixes, as in 'getting'.

How the word is built

• get (single Old Norse root meaning to obtain or seize); no prefix or suffix