Gran

How to spell gran

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gran

What does gran mean?

1. nounAn informal, affectionate word for one's grandmother.

Gran in a sentence

• Every Sunday we visit my gran for lunch.

• My gran taught me how to knit when I was small.

Where does gran come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is an affectionate clipping of 'grandmother', which itself joins 'grand', from the Latin grandis meaning 'great' or 'large', to the everyday English word 'mother'. The 'grand' element entered English through Old French, where it had come to be used in family titles to mean 'one generation removed', so a grandmother was literally a 'great mother' in the sense of a senior mother. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English speakers were trimming the long word down to cosy short forms such as 'grandma', 'granny' and the blunt single syllable 'gran'. The form 'gran' became especially common in British and Irish family speech during the twentieth century. Because it is simply the first syllable lopped off the longer word, the spelling holds no surprises beyond remembering it ends in a plain 'n' with no extra letters.

How the word is built

• gran (clipped form of grandmother, ultimately from grand- 'great'
• mother)