Lava

How to spell lava

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lava

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lava mean?

1. nounHot molten or solidified rock that has erupted from a volcano onto the surface.

Lava in a sentence

• The eruption sent a river of glowing lava down the mountainside.

• Tourists walked carefully across the cooled black lava near the crater.

Where does lava come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word came into English in the early 1700s straight from Italian, where lava named the molten rock that pours down a volcano. The Italian word originated in the Neapolitan dialect around Mount Vesuvius, where it first described a torrent or stream of rainwater that washed down a hillside, before being applied to the glowing flows of the volcano itself. Scholars trace it most plausibly to the Latin verb lavare, meaning 'to wash', the same root that gives us 'lavatory' and 'lava' as in a washing flood; some instead connect it to Latin labes, meaning 'a fall' or 'a sliding down'. Either way the early sense was of something that streams and slides downhill, which fits the slow, washing movement of molten rock. Because the spelling was simply adopted whole from Italian, it stayed short and phonetic, with no silent letters to trip a writer; the only real hazard is muddling it with the unrelated biology term 'larva'.

How the word is built

• lav- (from Italian lava, a flowing stream)
• -a (noun ending)