Laughter

How to spell laughter

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce laughter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does laughter mean?

1. nounThe act or sound of laughing, expressing amusement or joy.

Laughter in a sentence

• The comedian's opening joke filled the room with laughter.

• Warm laughter drifted from the kitchen where the family was gathered.

Where does laughter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Laughter comes from Old English hleahtor, the noun matching the verb hlæhhan, 'to laugh', and it has been part of English since the very earliest written records. The root is thought to be imitative, echoing the actual sound of laughing, a pattern found across the Germanic languages in relatives such as Old Norse hlatr and German Gelächter. The 'gh' in the middle is a fossil of an old guttural sound, once pronounced something like the rasp in Scottish 'loch', which English speakers gradually stopped sounding while keeping the letters frozen in the spelling. That silent, sound-changing 'gh' is exactly what trips writers up, since the word is now spoken as if it were 'laffter' yet still written with the historical 'gh'. The closing '-ter' is the same kind of action-noun ending that gives us 'slaughter', a word that rhymes on the page but, oddly, no longer in speech.

How the word is built

• laugh (from Old English hlæhhan: to laugh)
• -ter (noun-forming suffix denoting an action or result)