Inferno

How to spell inferno

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce inferno

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inferno mean?

1. nounA large, fierce, and destructive fire.

Inferno in a sentence

• Firefighters battled the inferno for nine hours before it was contained.

• The abandoned warehouse became a raging inferno within minutes.

Where does inferno come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word came into English from Italian, where inferno means 'hell'. The Italian form descends from the Late Latin infernus, meaning 'the lower regions' or 'the underworld', which was built on the Latin adjective infernus, meaning simply 'lower' or 'below', from inferus, 'low'. In Christian Latin the word narrowed to mean the place of the damned beneath the earth, and it became famous through Dante's fourteenth-century poem, whose first part is titled the Inferno. English borrowed it in the early nineteenth century, at first as a name for hell, then quickly extended it to mean any vast and raging fire, since flames were a natural image of the burning underworld. The same Latin inferus also gives us 'inferior', literally 'lower', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the f after the in-.

How the word is built

• infern- (from Latin infernus: lower, of the underworld)
• -o (Italian noun ending)