Lavender

How to spell lavender

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce lavender

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lavender mean?

1. nounA fragrant shrub with narrow grey-green leaves and spikes of small purple flowers, often dried for its scent.
2. adjectiveOf a pale purple colour resembling lavender flowers.

Lavender in a sentence

• noun

  She planted a row of lavender along the garden path.

• adjective

  She chose a lavender dress for the spring wedding.

• noun

  The dried lavender filled the linen cupboard with a calming scent.

• adjective

  The bedroom walls were painted a soft lavender tone.

Where does lavender come from?

Language of origin: French

Lavender came into English in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman and Old French lavendre, which descended from the Medieval Latin lavendula, the standard name for the fragrant shrub. The deeper root is genuinely uncertain, and that is worth flagging: one long-held idea links it to the Latin verb lavare, meaning 'to wash', because the dried flowers were tucked among freshly laundered linen and used to scent baths, while another tradition connects it to livere, meaning 'to be bluish or livid', after the colour of the blooms. The washing connection is so appealing that it shaped the spelling people expected, but scholars treat it as folk reasoning rather than proven fact. Over time the single word came to name not just the plant but also the pale purple shade of its flowers. The tricky part for spellers is the middle: the unstressed vowel in the second syllable sounds like a vague 'uh', so the safe memory hook is to recall the related laundry idea (lav-) and then the steady -ender finish, as in 'sender'.

How the word is built

• lavend- (from Medieval Latin lavendula, the plant name)
• -er (English noun ending replacing the Latin diminutive)