Heroine

How to spell heroine

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce heroine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heroine mean?

1. nounA woman admired for her courage, achievements, or noble qualities.

Heroine in a sentence

• The nurse was hailed as a heroine after rescuing three patients from the fire.

• The novel's heroine outwits her captors and saves the village.

Where does heroine come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word descends from the ancient Greek hērōinē, the feminine form of hērōs, which named a warrior or demigod who protected and defended others. The masculine hērōs passed through Latin as heros and into English as 'hero', while the feminine form reached English in the early 1600s by way of Latin heroina and French héroïne, originally describing a woman of superhuman courage or a demigoddess in myth. Over time the meaning softened to mean simply a woman admired for bravery or noble deeds, and later the chief female character of a story or play. The trailing silent 'e' is the whole spelling trap: it is exactly what separates heroine, the courageous woman, from heroin, the narcotic drug, even though the two are pronounced identically. The drug name was in fact coined much later, in the 1890s, from the German Heroin, supposedly because it made patients feel heroic.

How the word is built

• hero (from Greek hērōs: protector, warrior)
• -ine (feminine suffix)