Kidney

How to spell kidney

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kidney

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kidney mean?

1. nounEither of the pair of organs in the body that filter waste from the blood and produce urine.
2. nounThe kidney of an animal eaten as food, often in pies or fried dishes.

Kidney in a sentence

• The surgeon removed the diseased kidney during a long operation.

• The pub served a steak and kidney pie with thick gravy.

• Drinking enough water helps each kidney flush waste from the blood.

• She fried the lamb kidney with onions for breakfast.

Where does kidney come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Kidney is a genuinely puzzling word whose origins remain unsettled, so it is one of the rare common English nouns with no firmly agreed source. It appears in Middle English around the late 1200s as kidenei or kidnere, and the most widely repeated theory breaks it into two parts: an opening element of uncertain meaning and a final ey, the old English word for 'egg', a sensible image given the smooth, egg-like shape of the organ. The first element may be linked to an old word for 'belly' or 'womb', though scholars cannot prove it. An alternative idea reads the whole compound as 'belly-egg' or 'womb-egg'. Because the evidence is so thin, careful dictionaries simply mark the word 'origin uncertain', and the irregular -dney spelling, which gives no hint of how the parts once fit together, is exactly why the word can trip up a writer.

How the word is built

• kid- (uncertain, possibly Old English cwith 'womb' or related to 'kid')
• -ney (probably from ey 'egg', referring to the egg-like shape)