Hatch

How to spell hatch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hatch

What does hatch mean?

1. verbTo break out of an egg, or to cause young to emerge from eggs.
2. verbTo devise or secretly plan something, such as a scheme or idea.
3. nounA small door or covered opening, especially in a floor, wall, ship, or aircraft.

Hatch in a sentence

• verb

  The farmer waited for the duck eggs to hatch in the warm shed.

• verb

  The two managers met after hours to hatch a plan for cutting costs.

• noun

  The crew climbed down through the hatch into the lower deck.

• verb

  Chicks usually hatch about three weeks after the hen begins sitting.

• verb

  They began to hatch a strategy for winning back lost customers.

• noun

  Food was passed from the kitchen through a serving hatch into the dining room.

Where does hatch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb sense meaning to bring forth young from an egg comes from Middle English hacchen, recorded from around the 1200s, and is of Germanic origin, related to similar words in older Danish and German that meant to breed or produce offspring. From the literal act of chicks breaking out of eggs, English speakers extended the word figuratively to the bringing forth of ideas and schemes, giving us the familiar phrase to hatch a plan. The unrelated noun sense, an opening fitted with a small door or cover, descends instead from Old English haec, meaning a grate or gate, which is the same source as the surname element and place names ending in -hatch. A third specialist sense, the technique of shading a drawing with closely set parallel lines, was borrowed from the French hacher, meaning to chop or cut, the same root that gives us hatchet. Because three separate origins collapsed onto one short spelling, hatch is unusually rich for so plain a word.

How the word is built

• hatch (whole word; from Middle English hacchen, of Germanic origin)