Leather

How to spell leather

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce leather

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does leather mean?

1. nounA durable material made from the tanned hide of an animal.

Leather in a sentence

• The new sofa is covered in soft black leather.

• She polished her leather boots before the interview.

Where does leather come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Leather comes straight from the native Old English word leþer, which named the prepared skin of an animal, and it has been part of English since the very earliest records. It belongs to a wide Germanic family: Dutch has 'leer' and German has 'Leder', and scholars trace all of them back to a shared prehistoric Germanic root meaning 'hide' or 'skin'. The spelling preserves the old 'th' sound written with the digraph, while the 'ea' represents a vowel that has shifted over the centuries to the short 'e' we now say. That mismatch between the 'ea' on the page and the plain 'eh' sound is the small trap for writers, the same pattern seen in its near neighbours 'feather' and 'weather'. The word has stayed remarkably stable in meaning for over a thousand years, still pointing to the tanned animal skin used for shoes, bags, and belts.

How the word is built

• leath- (from Old English leþer: tanned hide)
• -er (noun ending)