Hug
verbTo hold someone closely in your arms as a sign of affection or comfort.
How to spell hug
3 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce hug
What does hug mean?
- verbTo hold someone closely in your arms as a sign of affection or comfort.
- nounAn act of holding someone closely in the arms.
Hug in a sentence
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verb
She leaned over to hug her grandmother at the airport.
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noun
A warm hug from a friend made the bad news easier to bear.
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verb
The children ran to hug their father when he came home.
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noun
She gave her colleague a quick hug to thank him.
Where does hug come from?
Language of origin: Old Norse
Hug first appears in English in the 1560s, both as a verb meaning to clasp closely in the arms and as a noun for such an embrace. Its origin is genuinely uncertain, but the most favoured explanation links it to the Old Norse verb hugga, meaning to comfort, console, or soothe, which itself grew from hugr, a noun meaning mind, thought, or mood. If that connection holds, the modern bodily embrace began life as an act of emotional comforting rather than a physical grip. Some scholars instead compare it to German hegen, meaning to foster or cherish, which carries the same protective feeling. Because the trail is faint, the word is recorded as origin uncertain, though the Norse comfort sense fits its warm modern meaning neatly. Its short, blunt spelling has stayed unchanged for centuries.
How the word is built
- hug (single root, no affixes)
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