Leech

How to spell leech

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce leech

What does leech mean?

1. nounA bloodsucking aquatic worm that attaches itself to a host to feed on blood.
2. nounA person who habitually exploits or depends on others for money or support.
3. verbTo habitually take money, resources, or support from someone else without giving anything back.

Leech in a sentence

• noun

  A fat leech had latched onto his ankle after he waded through the pond.

• noun

  His flatmate was a complete leech who never once paid toward the rent.

• verb

  He would rather leech off his parents than find a steady job.

• noun

  The museum display showed how a leech was once used in medical bloodletting.

• noun

  She finally cut off the old friend who had become a financial leech.

• verb

  Some neighbours try to leech free wifi from the cafe next door.

Where does leech come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Leech traces back to the Old English word lǣce, which meant a physician or healer, and to the closely related lyce, the name for the bloodsucking aquatic worm. Both come from Germanic roots, and the two senses became tangled because early healers genuinely used the worms to draw blood from patients, a practice called bloodletting that survived into the nineteenth century. So for a long time a 'leech' could mean either the doctor or the creature the doctor applied, and the medical sense slowly faded while the worm sense endured. From the worm, which clings and drains, English developed the familiar figurative meaning of a person who attaches themselves to others and lives off them. The spelling trap is the long 'ee' and the final 'ch', and the fact that leech sounds exactly like leach, the verb meaning to drain something out by percolation; keeping the animal and exploiter spelled with double e helps separate it from that watery cousin.

How the word is built

• leech (single root, from Old English lǣce/lyce, a healer and the bloodsucking worm); no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like leech

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

• leach: To drain away or extract soluble substances as liquid percolates through a material such as soil.