Knight

How to spell knight

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce knight

What does knight mean?

1. nounA man given honourable military rank in the Middle Ages, or a person awarded a title such as Sir for service to the crown.
2. nounThe chess piece shaped like a horse's head that moves in an L-shaped pattern.
3. verbTo raise someone to the rank of knight, usually by royal ceremony.

Knight in a sentence

• noun

  The medieval knight wore polished armour and carried a heavy lance.

• noun

  She moved her knight to fork the rook and the queen.

• verb

  The monarch will knight the scientist for his lifetime of research.

• noun

  The actor was made a knight by the queen for his work on stage.

• noun

  The knight is the only chess piece that can jump over others.

• verb

  Kings would often knight a soldier on the battlefield for bravery.

Where does knight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English cniht, which originally meant simply a boy, a youth, or a servant attending a lord. Over the medieval centuries the sense climbed steadily up the social ladder: a household servant became a military attendant, then a mounted soldier serving a king, and finally a man raised to honourable rank for that service. The spelling preserves a fossilised pronunciation; the initial k and the gh were both sounded in early English, so cniht was once spoken roughly as 'k-nicht', and only later did English drop those sounds while keeping the old letters on the page. That silent k and silent gh are exactly what make the word a spelling trap, and they also turn it into a perfect homophone of 'night', a completely unrelated word. The German cognate Knecht, still meaning a servant or farmhand, shows how close knight once stood to humble service rather than glory.

How the word is built

• kn- (silent initial cluster from Old English cniht)
• -ight (spelling of the long /aɪ/ vowel with silent gh)

Words that sound like knight

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• night: The period of darkness between sunset and sunrise, when it is dark outside.