Inch

How to spell inch

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce inch

What does inch mean?

1. nounA unit of length equal to one twelfth of a foot, about 2.54 centimetres.
2. verbTo move slowly and in small stages.

Inch in a sentence

• noun

  The shelf was one inch too wide for the alcove.

• verb

  The queue began to inch forward toward the ticket gate.

• noun

  Heavy rain dropped almost an inch of water overnight.

• verb

  She watched the share price inch higher all afternoon.

Where does inch come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Inch entered Old English as 'ynce', borrowed early from the Latin word 'uncia', which literally meant 'a twelfth part'. The Romans used uncia for a twelfth of their foot measure and also for a twelfth of their unit of weight, and that very same Latin root gave English its other descendant 'ounce', so an inch and an ounce are linguistic cousins despite measuring quite different things. Over the centuries the spelling settled into 'inch' as the soft Latin 'c' shifted toward the 'ch' sound in English. The figurative verb sense, meaning to move forward by tiny degrees, grew naturally from the idea of advancing one small inch at a time. The short, blunt spelling holds few traps; the only real care is the final 'ch', which mirrors the sound rather than a Latin 'c'.

How the word is built

• inch (from Latin uncia: a twelfth part), borrowed whole into Old English with no prefix or suffix