Lamb

How to spell lamb

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lamb

What does lamb mean?

1. nounA young sheep, or the meat from one.

Lamb in a sentence

• A new lamb was born this morning.

• Roast lamb is traditional at Easter.

Where does lamb come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lamb comes straight from Old English lamb, the native Germanic word for a young sheep, and it has barely changed in well over a thousand years. It belongs to a wider family of related forms across the Germanic languages, including Old Norse lamb, Old High German lamb, and Gothic lamb, all meaning the same young animal. The final b was once fully pronounced, but in spoken English it fell silent centuries ago, leaving a written letter with no sound; this is the spelling trap, since the word sounds simply like 'lam'. The same silent-b pattern shows up in close relatives such as 'climb', 'comb', and 'thumb', where the b lingers in the spelling even though the tongue never touches it. The animal sense naturally extended to the meat of a young sheep and, figuratively, to a gentle or innocent person, as in calling someone meek as a lamb.

How the word is built

• lamb (whole word; the b is a silent etymological remnant)

Words that sound like lamb

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

• lam: A hurried escape or period of hiding, especially to avoid arrest, used in the phrase 'on the lam'.