Lair

How to spell lair

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lair

What does lair mean?

1. nounA wild animal's resting place or den, where it shelters and hides.
2. nounA private hideaway or secret retreat where a person stays concealed or undisturbed.

Lair in a sentence

• The fox dragged its prey back to the lair beneath the hedge.

• The detective traced the gang back to their lair above the warehouse.

• Trackers found the bear's lair in a hollow under the fallen oak.

• He turned the basement into his own lair full of gadgets and screens.

Where does lair come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lair comes straight from the Old English word leger, which meant a bed or a place where someone or something lies down. That noun grew from the same Germanic root as the verb 'to lie' (to recline), so the original idea was simply a spot for resting or sleeping. Over the centuries the meaning narrowed toward the resting place of a wild animal, the hidden den where a creature retreats to sleep or shelter. The closely related German word 'Lager', meaning a store, camp, or resting place, and even the beer name 'lager' (beer stored to mature), share this same ancestry. Because the word descends from native English rather than being borrowed later, its spelling stayed short and blunt; the spelling trap is purely the '-air' ending, which sounds like 'layer' without being spelled that way.

How the word is built

• lair (a single root from Old English leger: a place of lying down; no separate prefix or suffix)