Hull

How to spell hull

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hull

What does hull mean?

1. nounThe main watertight body or frame of a ship or boat.
2. nounThe dry outer covering of a seed or grain, or the leafy cap of a fruit such as a strawberry.
3. verbTo remove the outer covering, husk, or leafy cap from a seed or fruit.

Hull in a sentence

• noun

  The hull of the yacht was scraped clean before repainting.

• noun

  She flicked the green hull off each ripe strawberry.

• verb

  You can hull the strawberries before adding them to the bowl.

• noun

  A sharp rock tore a hole in the hull below the waterline.

• noun

  The rice grain hides inside a tough protective hull.

• verb

  The machine is designed to hull the dried beans quickly.

Where does hull come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hull comes from the Old English word 'hulu', which meant a husk, pod, or outer covering, and it is connected to the verb 'helan', meaning 'to cover' or 'to conceal'. That same Germanic root for covering survives in the modern German 'Hulle', meaning a wrapper or sheath, and it explains why the oldest English meaning of hull is the dry shell around a seed or the green cap on a strawberry. By the 1400s and 1500s the word had been carried over to the body of a ship, the great outer shell that holds everything inside and keeps the water out, a natural extension of the idea of a covering. The spelling has stayed short and stubbornly simple, with the doubled 'l' marking the short vowel, so the chief trap is simply remembering it is not spelled like the city or like 'hall'. Both the seed sense and the boat sense therefore trace back to one plain idea: the thing that wraps or encloses what is precious inside.

How the word is built

• hull (from Old English hulu: husk, outer covering)