Knee

How to spell knee

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce knee

What does knee mean?

1. nounThe joint in the middle of the human leg where the thigh and lower leg meet.

Knee in a sentence

• I bumped my knee on the table.

• I scraped my knee falling off the bike.

Where does knee come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Knee comes from the Old English cneow, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the joint between the thigh and the lower leg. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form knewam, which is why German still has Knie and Dutch knie, and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root genu that also gave Latin genu and Greek gonu, both meaning 'knee'. In early English the initial k was actually pronounced, so the word sounded roughly like 'k-neow', but during the 1600s English speakers stopped voicing k before n while the spelling stayed frozen in place. That historical pronunciation is exactly why the silent k survives today and trips up writers, just as it does in knife, knot, and knock. The result is a short everyday word whose only real spelling trap is remembering the leading k and the doubled e.

How the word is built

• knee (whole Germanic root; the silent k- preserves the Old English spelling cneow)