Hearth

How to spell hearth

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hearth

What does hearth mean?

1. nounThe floor of a fireplace, usually paved or tiled, and by extension the area around it.
2. nounThe home or family life, used figuratively for the centre of domestic comfort.

Hearth in a sentence

• The cat curled up on the warm hearth in front of the fire.

• After months abroad he longed for the comfort of his own hearth.

• She swept the ash from the stone hearth before bed.

• The soldiers wrote letters about hearth and home while stationed overseas.

Where does hearth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hearth comes straight from the Old English word heorth, which named the floor of a fireplace and the fire that burned there. It is a native Germanic word, with close cousins in Old Saxon and Old High German, all going back to a Proto-Germanic root herth meaning the place where a fire is laid. Some scholars link that root further back to an ancient Indo-European base meaning 'to burn' or 'glow', the same family of ideas that gives us words for warmth and embers. Because the fireplace sat at the centre of the home, hearth came to stand for the home itself, surviving in the old pairing 'hearth and home'. The tricky 'ear' spelling, pronounced like 'her', is a fossil of that early English form, which is exactly why writers reach for the wrong vowels.

How the word is built

• hearth (single Old English root heorth: the fireside floor); no prefix or suffix