Hammer

How to spell hammer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hammer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hammer mean?

1. nounA hand tool with a heavy head fixed at right angles to a handle, used for driving in nails or breaking things.
2. verbTo strike or beat repeatedly with, or as if with, a hammer.

Hammer in a sentence

• noun

  He reached for a hammer to drive the nail flush with the board.

• verb

  The workers had to hammer the metal sheet until it lay flat.

• noun

  The claw of the hammer is useful for prising out bent nails.

• verb

  Rain began to hammer against the office windows during the storm.

Where does hammer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hammer comes straight from the Old English hamor, a native Germanic word that meant exactly what it does today: a tool with a heavy head for striking. The same root runs right across the Germanic languages, surviving as Hammer in modern German and hamar in the Scandinavian tongues. Scholars believe the deepest origin lies in an even older word for 'stone', because the earliest hammers were simply shaped rocks, and a related Old Norse word hamarr could mean both 'hammer' and 'crag' or 'rocky cliff'. That stone connection is a nice reminder of how the very first tools were made before metal working. The doubled m in the modern spelling reflects the short vowel that precedes it, and the word has stayed remarkably stable in form and sense for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• hammer (whole word, from Old English hamor; no separable prefix or suffix)