Graft

How to spell graft

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce graft

What does graft mean?

1. verbTo join a shoot, piece of skin, or living tissue onto another plant or body so that it grows there.
2. nounDishonest gain or bribery obtained through one's position, especially in politics or business.
3. nounDemanding, sustained effort or hard work.

Graft in a sentence

• verb

  The surgeon will graft skin from her thigh onto the burn.

• noun

  The investigation exposed years of graft at city hall.

• noun

  Building the business took years of sheer graft.

• verb

  Orchard growers graft young shoots onto sturdy rootstock each spring.

• noun

  The contractor was jailed for graft after bribing inspectors.

• noun

  She is not afraid of hard graft and long hours.

Where does graft come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word graft entered English in the late 1400s as 'graff', borrowed from the Old French grafe (also greffe), meaning a shoot or twig cut for planting into another plant. That French word traces back through Latin graphium to the Greek graphion, which literally meant a 'pointed writing tool' or stylus; gardeners borrowed the name because a slender plant shoot prepared for grafting looked much like a sharpened stylus. The final 't' was added in English by the 1500s, probably by analogy with words that already ended that way, giving us the modern spelling. From the literal horticultural sense the word spread to surgery, where living tissue is joined onto the body, and then branched into two very different slang lives: in nineteenth-century American politics it came to mean dishonest gain from public office, while in British usage it picked up the sense of plain hard work. The shared Greek ancestor graphion also gives us 'graphic' and 'graphite', a useful reminder of why the word is spelled with that crisp 'gr' opening.

How the word is built

• graft (single root, from Old French grafe meaning a shoot or scion, ultimately from Greek graphion 'pointed stylus')