Hamper

How to spell hamper

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hamper

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hamper mean?

1. verbTo slow down or obstruct the progress of something or someone.
2. nounA large basket, often with a lid, used for carrying food or for holding dirty laundry.

Hamper in a sentence

• verb

  Heavy snow can hamper the morning commute for thousands of drivers.

• noun

  She dropped the towels into the laundry hamper before bed.

• verb

  A lack of funding will hamper the research team for years.

• noun

  The company sent each client a festive hamper filled with cheese and wine.

Where does hamper come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hamper has two unrelated strands that happen to share the same spelling. The verb meaning 'to hinder or impede' appears in late Middle English around the 1300s, probably from a Germanic source related to words meaning 'to shackle or mangle'; its precise ancestor is uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge on it. The noun meaning 'a large basket' is a worn-down form of the older 'hanaper', borrowed through Anglo-French from Old French 'hanepier', a case for holding a 'hanap', meaning a goblet or drinking cup. Over time the rounded vowel collapsed and the word shortened to the modern 'hamper'. The royal office of the Hanaper in medieval England, where documents were kept in such baskets, preserves the older spelling. The single consonants throughout (no doubling) are the small spelling point worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• hamper (a single, unanalysable root; no separable prefix or suffix)