Jade

How to spell jade

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jade

What does jade mean?

1. nounA hard, typically green ornamental stone used for carvings and jewellery.

Jade in a sentence

• The museum displayed a carved jade dragon from imperial China.

• She wore a smooth jade pendant on a silver chain.

Where does jade come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Jade the green stone reaches English through a tangle of borrowings that explains its odd, hard-to-predict spelling. The Spanish called it piedra de ijada, the 'stone of the flank' or 'stone of the loins', because they believed pressing it against the side could cure colic and kidney complaints; ijada itself goes back to Latin ilia, meaning the flanks or lower abdomen. French speakers borrowed the term but mis-divided l'ejade as le jade, and that re-cut form passed into English in the seventeenth century. A quite separate and much older sense of jade, meaning a worn-out or ill-tempered horse, has murky roots possibly tied to Old Norse jalda, 'a mare'; from that horse the verb 'to jade' (to wear out) and the familiar adjective 'jaded' both grew. So one short word carries two unrelated stories, the precious stone from Spain and the tired old nag from the north.

How the word is built

• jade (a single unanalysable root, from Spanish ijada meaning 'flank' or 'side', with no prefix or suffix)