Hour

How to spell hour

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hour

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hour mean?

1. nounA period of sixty minutes, or a particular point in time during the day.

Hour in a sentence

• I'll be back in an hour.

• The meeting lasted an hour and a half.

• Set the alarm for the hour before sunrise.

• Every hour the bells in the tower ring.

• It's the rush hour on the roads.

Where does hour come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the ancient Greek hora, which meant a fixed period of time, a season, or a part of the day. Latin took it as hora, and Old French carried it forward as 'ore' or 'ure', meaning a twelfth part of the daylight. English borrowed it in the 1200s, at first writing it without the 'h' to match the way it was actually pronounced. Later scholars, looking back to the Latin spelling hora, restored the silent 'h' on the page even though no English speaker ever pronounced it. That cosmetic 'h' is exactly why 'hour' looks the way it does and why it sounds identical to 'our', the classic spelling trap.

How the word is built

• hour (from Greek hora: a season, time of day); the silent 'h' is a Latin-influenced spelling

Words that sound like hour

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

• our: Belonging to or associated with us, the speaker and one or more others.