Heel

How to spell heel

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heel

What does heel mean?

1. nounThe rounded back part of the human foot, below the ankle.
2. nounThe raised part at the back of a shoe that supports the rear of the foot.
3. verbTo make a dog walk closely beside its handler, or for the dog to do so.

Heel in a sentence

• noun

  The new boots rubbed a blister on her left heel.

• noun

  The right shoe had a broken heel that needed repair.

• verb

  The trainer taught the puppy to heel on a loose lead.

• noun

  He limped because a stone had bruised his heel.

• noun

  She snapped the heel off her shoe on the cobbled street.

• verb

  A well drilled spaniel will heel at its owner's left side.

Where does heel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heel comes from the Old English hela, an inherited Germanic word for the rounded back part of the foot, related to the Old Norse haell and ultimately to the same root that gave us 'hock' for an animal's joint. The form was once spelled 'hele' and the modern double 'ee' settled in to mark the long vowel sound. From the body part the meaning spread outward in very practical ways: by the late medieval period it named the raised back portion of a shoe, then the rounded end of a loaf of bread, and figuratively the lowest or hindmost part of almost anything. A separate sailing sense, where a boat leans to one side, actually comes from a different old verb 'heeld' meaning to incline, but the two words collapsed into the same spelling over time. The persistent spelling trap is its homophone 'heal', which descends from a wholly unrelated root meaning 'to make whole'; same sound, different family, different 'ea'/'ee' vowel spelling.

How the word is built

• heel (from Old English hela: the hindmost part of the foot); single root, no affixes

Words that sound like heel

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• he'll: A contraction of 'he will' or 'he shall', used to state what a male person is going to do.
• heal: To become healthy again, or to make a wound, illness, or injury better.