Heather

How to spell heather

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heather

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heather mean?

1. nounA low evergreen shrub with small purple, pink, or white flowers that grows on moorland and acidic soil.

Heather in a sentence

• The hillside was covered in purple heather by late summer.

• She planted a row of heather along the edge of the rockery.

Where does heather come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heather comes from Middle English forms such as 'hather' and 'hadder', words used in northern England and Scotland for the low, woody shrub that carpets moorland with tiny purple or pink flowers. The earliest origin is genuinely uncertain, and no clear parent word has been pinned down, which is why dictionaries treat it as an obscure native term. Over the centuries the spelling drifted toward its modern shape because people associated the plant with the open 'heath' on which it grows, and that link nudged the older 'hadder' toward 'heather'. The plant has long been a powerful symbol of Scottish landscape, and the word's homely, weathered look on the page mirrors the windswept hills it describes. The spelling trap is the silent-feeling 'ea' and the soft 'th', since the word sounds like 'hether' but keeps the 'a' that ties it to heath.

How the word is built

• heath (open uncultivated land)
• -er (noun ending, by association); originally a separate northern word later reshaped to look like heath