Kneel

How to spell kneel

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce kneel

What does kneel mean?

1. verbTo rest or lower the body so that one or both knees are on the ground.

Kneel in a sentence

• The gardener had to kneel on a cushion to plant the bulbs.

• Worshippers kneel during that part of the service.

Where does kneel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that traces back to the Old English verb cnēowlian, meaning 'to bend the knee', formed from cnēow, the word for the knee itself. The silent initial k is a fossil from a time when English speakers genuinely pronounced both the k and the n at the start of words like knee, knife and knight; over several centuries the k sound was dropped from speech, roughly by the 1600s, but the spelling stubbornly kept it. The same cnēow root sits behind the modern noun 'knee', which is why both words carry that troublesome silent k. Related forms appear across the older Germanic languages, where the underlying root referred to the bend of the leg. The spelling trap is therefore double: the silent k at the front and the double e in the middle, both inherited unchanged from the medieval form.

How the word is built

• knee (from Old English cnēow: the joint of the leg)
• -l (frequentative/verb-forming element)