Heath

How to spell heath

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heath

What does heath mean?

1. nounAn area of open, uncultivated land, typically with poor soil and covered by low shrubs such as heather and gorse.
2. nounA low evergreen shrub, related to heather, with small leaves and pink or purple flowers.

Heath in a sentence

• The walkers crossed a windswept heath before reaching the coast.

• She planted a low heath along the border for year-round colour.

• Rare ground-nesting birds breed on the sandy heath each spring.

• The rockery was dotted with clumps of purple heath.

Where does heath come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descended directly from the Old English hǣth, which meant open, untilled country covered with rough vegetation. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Dutch heide and the German Heide, all pointing back to a Proto-Germanic root for wild, uncultivated land. Curiously, the same ancestral root is thought to lie behind the word 'heathen', because such people were once pictured as living out on the wild heaths beyond the settled, Christianised towns. Over time the word narrowed in everyday use to describe both the sandy, acidic landscape itself and the low evergreen shrub, related to heather, that thrives on it. The simple spelling preserves its old Anglo-Saxon shape, with the 'th' standing where Old English wrote the letter thorn.

How the word is built

• heath (Old English hǣth: open uncultivated land)