Hump

How to spell hump

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hump

What does hump mean?

1. nounA rounded raised lump or swelling on a surface or on the body.
2. verbTo lift and carry something heavy with effort.

Hump in a sentence

• noun

  The camel stored fat in the hump on its back.

• verb

  We had to hump the boxes up four flights of stairs.

• noun

  Drivers slowed down for the hump in the road.

• verb

  The removal crew will hump the furniture into the van.

Where does hump come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hump is a relatively late arrival in English, first recorded in the late 1600s, and its earlier history is genuinely murky. The most likely source is a Low German or Dutch family of words, such as Dutch 'homp' meaning a lump or hunk and Low German 'humpe', both pointing to the idea of a rounded swelling or chunk. It may also have been reinforced by the older English word 'hunch', with which it overlapped in meaning. Because the word entered through trade and everyday speech rather than scholarly writing, no neat documented chain survives, which is why dictionaries label its origin uncertain. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with no silent letters, so the trap is more about its plainness than any hidden quirk. Its rounded, bumpy sense has stayed remarkably stable from the camel's back to the speed bump in a car park.

How the word is built

• hump (a single root word; no prefix or suffix, from a Germanic root meaning a lump or swelling)