Hood

How to spell hood

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hood

What does hood mean?

1. nounA soft covering for the head and neck, often attached to a coat or robe.
2. nounThe hinged metal cover over the engine of a car (the British equivalent is bonnet).
3. nounInformal term for one's local neighbourhood or home area.

Hood in a sentence

• She pulled the hood over her head when the rain started.

• He lifted the hood to check the oil level.

• He grew up in this hood and knows every street.

• The raincoat has a detachable hood for windy days.

• Steam poured out from under the hood after the engine overheated.

• A new coffee shop just opened in the hood.

Where does hood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hood descends from the Old English word hod, which simply meant a soft covering for the head, and it traces back through the older Germanic languages to a root meaning 'to cover' or 'to protect'. That same protective root lies behind the word 'hat', so hood and hat are distant cousins from the same family of head coverings. The everyday spelling has barely changed in a thousand years, keeping the short double-o that gives it its rounded vowel. Over the centuries the meaning spread outward from clothing: any cover shaped like a head covering, such as the part of a coat or the cover over a car engine, came to be called a hood. The modern informal sense meaning 'neighbourhood' is a much later clipping of that longer word, popularised in twentieth-century American speech. The familiar suffix '-hood' in words like childhood and neighbourhood is a separate but related element meaning 'state or condition'.

How the word is built

• hood (whole word, from Old English hod: a head covering); no prefix or suffix