Gloss

How to spell gloss

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gloss

What does gloss mean?

1. nounA smooth, shiny surface or sheen, often produced deliberately on paper, paint, or hair.
2. nounA brief explanation or translation of a difficult word, printed in the margin or between the lines of a text.
3. verbTo deal with something quickly so as to hide or play down its problems (usually followed by 'over').

Gloss in a sentence

• noun

  The fresh wax gave the car a deep gloss.

• noun

  The editor added a gloss beside each obscure legal term.

• verb

  The report seemed to gloss over the budget shortfall.

• noun

  She chose a high gloss for the kitchen cabinets.

• noun

  A medieval scribe wrote a gloss above the Latin word.

• verb

  Managers should not gloss over safety concerns.

Where does gloss come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Gloss is really two different words that ended up spelled the same way. The 'shine' sense, which is the everyday meaning, appeared in English in the early 1500s and is thought to come from a Scandinavian or Low German source related to words for a glow or a smooth bright surface, the same family of northern European words that gave us 'glow' and 'glare'. The 'explanation' sense has a quite separate and much older pedigree: it comes from the Greek glossa, which literally meant 'the tongue' and so by extension 'a language' or 'a word needing explanation'. That Greek word passed into Latin as glossa, a note written in the margin to explain a difficult term, and entered English in the medieval period through scholarly Latin. The same Greek glossa survives in 'glossary' and in medical words such as 'glossitis', an inflammation of the tongue. Because both senses settled on the simple spelling with a double s, the trap for writers is purely the doubled consonant at the end rather than the origin.

How the word is built

• gloss (single free root; no affixes)