Hymn

How to spell hymn

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hymn

What does hymn mean?

1. nounA song of praise, especially one sung by a congregation during a religious service.

Hymn in a sentence

• The congregation opened the service with a familiar hymn.

• The choir rehearsed a familiar hymn before the Sunday service.

Where does hymn come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek hymnos, which meant a song or ode written in praise of gods or heroes. The Greeks used it for ceremonial poetry sung at festivals, and the Romans took it over as the Latin hymnus to describe songs of praise. It travelled into Old English as ymen and was later reshaped through Old French ymne, before scholars during the Renaissance restored the classical h and the final silent n to mirror the Greek and Latin spelling. That deliberate return to the ancient form is exactly why the word now carries a silent n that the ear never hears, the same pattern seen in 'autumn' and 'column'. By the medieval church period it had narrowed to its familiar modern sense of a religious song sung by a congregation.

How the word is built

• hymn (single root, from Greek hymnos: a song of praise)
• silent -n

Words that sound like hymn

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

• him: The objective form of 'he', used for a male person or animal as the object of a verb or preposition.