Keep

How to spell keep

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce keep

What does keep mean?

1. verbTo continue to have or hold something rather than give it up.
2. nounThe strongest central tower of a medieval castle, used as a final stronghold.
3. nounThe cost of a person's food and lodging.

Keep in a sentence

• verb

  You can keep the change from the twenty.

• noun

  Tourists climbed the stone steps to the castle keep for the view.

• noun

  The farmhand earned his keep plus a small weekly wage.

• verb

  Please keep the receipt in case the laptop needs returning.

• noun

  The medieval keep stood at the heart of the fortress, walls metres thick.

• noun

  The apprentice worked long hours and barely earned his keep.

Where does keep come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Keep comes straight from the Old English verb cepan, which meant 'to seize, hold on to, watch over, or pay attention to'. The early senses were surprisingly broad, covering both physical grasping and careful observing, which is why we can still 'keep' an object, 'keep' a promise, and 'keep' watch. Scholars are not entirely certain where cepan itself came from before Old English, and it has no clear cousins in the other Germanic languages, which makes it one of the more mysterious common words in English. Over the medieval period the spelling settled with the long 'ee' vowel, and by the 1300s the noun sense for the fortified inner tower of a castle had appeared, since that was the part you held and defended. The same word later gave us the idea of someone's 'keep', meaning the cost of feeding and housing them. Despite its everyday plainness, its murky pre-English history is the reason dictionaries usually mark its deeper origin as uncertain.

How the word is built

• keep (a single root, from Old English cepan: to seize, hold, or watch over); no prefix or suffix