Globe

How to spell globe

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce globe

What does globe mean?

1. nounA spherical object, especially a model of the Earth or the planet itself.

Globe in a sentence

• The teacher spun the wooden globe to show where the oceans lay.

• Products from this factory are shipped to every corner of the globe.

Where does globe come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin globus, which literally meant a round ball, sphere, or compact mass; the same root sits behind related words such as 'globule' and the verb 'agglomerate', meaning to gather into a clump. English took the word in during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, partly through French globe, and used it first for any rounded body before it settled on the sense of a model of the Earth or heavens mounted as a sphere. From there it broadened naturally to mean the Earth itself, since the planet is round, and that geographic sense is now the most familiar. The silent final -e, inherited from the Latin and French spelling, is what keeps the vowel long and turns 'glob' into 'globe'; it is the small trap worth remembering, since the bare root 'glob' is a separate everyday word for a shapeless lump.

How the word is built

• glob- (from Latin globus: a round ball or sphere)
• silent -e