Inn

How to spell inn

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce inn

What does inn mean?

1. nounA small establishment, often by a roadside, that provides lodging, food, and drink to travellers.

Inn in a sentence

• The weary cyclists booked a room at a country inn for the night.

• The old coaching inn had stabled horses two centuries ago.

Where does inn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Inn comes from the Old English word inn, which meant a dwelling place, a lodging, or simply a room where one stayed. It is closely tied to the word 'in', since the original sense was literally an interior space, a place within which travellers could shelter. Over the medieval period the meaning narrowed to a public house that offered food, drink, and a bed to travellers along a route, and by the late Middle Ages an inn was firmly understood as a roadside establishment with rooms for hire. The doubled final n preserves the older spelling and is precisely what separates it on the page from its everyday homophone 'in'. The word survives today both literally and in the names of countless pubs and hotels that still call themselves an inn.

How the word is built

• inn (a single Old English root meaning a dwelling or lodging; no affixes)

Words that sound like inn

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

• in: Expressing the situation of being enclosed or surrounded by something, or located within a place, period, or state.