Guts

How to spell guts

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce guts

What does guts mean?

1. nounThe internal organs, especially the stomach and intestines, of a person or animal.
2. nounCourage, nerve, and determination in a difficult situation.
3. nounThe essential inner parts or working components of a machine or structure.

Guts in a sentence

• The angler cleaned the fish and threw the guts into a bucket.

• It took real guts to quit a secure job and start her own firm.

• The mechanic stripped out the guts of the old engine to rebuild it.

• The punch landed hard in his guts and left him winded.

• He never had the guts to confront his manager about the unpaid hours.

• Renovating the kitchen meant tearing out the guts of the cabinets and wiring.

Where does guts come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English plural of gut, which appears in early texts as 'guttas', meaning the bowels or intestines. The root is generally linked to a Germanic source connected to the idea of a channel or something poured, related to the verb that gave English 'gut' and possibly to 'gote', an old word for a water channel. For centuries it referred plainly to the entrails of people and animals, which is why a butcher or angler still speaks of cleaning the guts from a carcass or a fish. By the early 1800s English speakers had transferred the word to mean courage and nerve, the seat of bold feeling being imagined deep in the belly, much as we still say a decision was made on 'gut instinct'. A separate everyday sense, the inner workings or essential parts of a machine, grew from the same image of what lies inside. The spelling is mercifully regular: a short, blunt Anglo-Saxon word with no silent letters, just the plural -s.

How the word is built

• gut (Old English gutt: intestine, channel)
• -s (plural)