Heartbeat

How to spell heartbeat

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heartbeat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heartbeat mean?

1. nounA single pulsation of the heart, or the rhythmic throbbing the heart produces.
2. nounThe central, animating force or most vital part of something.

Heartbeat in a sentence

• The monitor traced every heartbeat during the operation.

• The busy market square is the heartbeat of the whole town.

• The doctor listened for a steady heartbeat before discharging the patient.

• Customer service is the heartbeat of their entire business.

Where does heartbeat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heartbeat is a transparent compound of two very old native English words, heart and beat. Heart comes from the Old English heorte, which named the organ in the chest and, even then, stood as the seat of feeling and courage; it traces back to a shared Germanic root that also gave German Herz and is a distant cousin of Latin cor and Greek kardia. Beat comes from the Old English beatan, meaning to strike or pound repeatedly, the same verb that survives in beating a drum. The two were joined to describe the regular striking or throbbing of the heart, a sense recorded from the early modern period and made everyday by the rise of the medical pulse. Because both parts are plain English words spelled exactly as they sound to a literate adult, the only real trap is the silent association of the ea spelling in heart, which is pronounced 'ar' rather than the 'ee' you might expect.

How the word is built

• heart (Old English heorte: the heart)
• beat (Old English beatan: to strike, throb)