Hangover

How to spell hangover

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hangover

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hangover mean?

1. nounThe unpleasant physical feeling of headache, nausea, and tiredness experienced after drinking too much alcohol.
2. nounSomething remaining or surviving from an earlier time or situation.

Hangover in a sentence

• She nursed a terrible hangover with strong coffee and aspirin.

• The strict dress code is a hangover from the company's military past.

• He blamed his hangover for arriving late to the morning meeting.

• That outdated rule is a hangover from a different generation of management.

Where does hangover come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, built transparently from the verb 'hang' and the adverb 'over', both of which descend from Old English and the wider Germanic family: 'hangian' meant to be suspended, and 'ofer' carried the sense of something extending beyond or remaining afterward. The literal idea is of something left hanging over from an earlier time. The general sense of a leftover or survival from the past appeared in the nineteenth century, but the now dominant meaning, the unpleasant physical state following heavy drinking, only became common in the early twentieth century, around 1900 in American usage. The spelling is straightforward once you see it as two ordinary words joined together, with no hidden silent letters; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single solid word, not 'hang over'.

How the word is built

• hang (to remain, to hang)
• over (remaining afterward)