Height

How to spell height

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce height

What does height mean?

1. nounThe measurement of how tall something is, or the distance from bottom to top; also a peak or highest point.

Height in a sentence

• What's the height of the ceiling?

• The height of the building is impressive.

Where does height come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English heahthu or hiehthu, meaning 'highness' or 'the top of something', built from heah, the ancestor of the modern adjective 'high', plus an abstract noun ending that turned the quality into a thing. That same ending survives in pairs like 'wide' and 'width' or 'broad' and 'breadth', where a description becomes a measurement. Over the centuries the second part drifted in spelling and pronunciation, settling on the unusual '-ght' ending we now write, even though related words such as 'highness' kept the older look. The final sound is a hard 't', not the 'th' of 'width', and that mismatch between expectation and spelling is the classic trap: people reach for 'heighth' or 'hight'. The word has meant both physical tallness and a figurative peak or climax (as in the height of summer) since the Middle Ages.

How the word is built

• high (from Old English heah: tall)
• -th/-t (noun-forming suffix denoting a quality or state)