Heart

How to spell heart

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heart

What does heart mean?

1. nounThe muscular organ that pumps blood around the body.
2. nounThe centre of a person's emotions, affection, or courage.
3. nounThe central or most important part of something.

Heart in a sentence

• The doctor listened to her heart with a stethoscope.

• She put her whole heart into the new project.

• The old market sits at the heart of the city.

• Regular exercise keeps the heart strong and healthy.

• The kind gesture warmed his heart.

• Honesty lies at the heart of their friendship.

Where does heart come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heart descends from the Old English heorte, the word for the muscular organ that pumps blood, and it traces back through the Proto-Germanic hertan to a very ancient root that also produced the Latin cor and the Greek kardia, both meaning 'heart'. From its earliest days the word carried a double duty, naming both the physical organ and the seat of feeling, courage, and memory, which is why we still speak of learning something 'by heart'. The familiar relatives reveal the old root clearly: Latin cor gives us 'cordial' and 'courage', while Greek kardia gives us 'cardiac' and 'cardiology'. The spelling is the real trap, because the modern pronunciation no longer matches the letters; the 'ea' is a leftover from older English vowel sounds, so the word is sounded like 'hart' yet still written with that silent-feeling 'ea'. English has kept this conservative spelling since the medieval period, long after the pronunciation drifted away from it.

How the word is built

• heart (single Old English root heorte; the unexpected 'ea' spelling preserves an older vowel)