Hawthorn

How to spell hawthorn

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hawthorn

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hawthorn mean?

1. nounA thorny shrub or small tree with white or pink blossom and small red berries, often grown as a hedge.

Hawthorn in a sentence

• A row of hawthorn formed a dense boundary between the two fields.

• The hawthorn in the lane was covered in white blossom by early May.

Where does hawthorn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hawthorn comes from the Old English hagathorn or haguthorn, a compound of haga, meaning 'hedge' or 'enclosure', and thorn, the familiar word for a sharp spine on a plant. The literal sense was therefore 'the thorny tree of the hedge', which fits perfectly because the dense, prickly hawthorn has been planted to mark field boundaries and form stockproof hedges for many centuries. The first element drifted in form over time from haga to the modern 'haw', a spelling that survives separately as the name for the small red berry the tree produces. Both parts of the word are native Germanic vocabulary that English has carried since Anglo-Saxon times, with no borrowing from Latin or French involved. The spelling trap lies entirely in that opening 'haw', which sounds like 'haa' and tempts writers toward 'hawthorne' with a needless final 'e', an ending made famous by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne but wrong for the plant.

How the word is built

• haw (from Old English haga: hedge)
• thorn (a sharp spine)