Legend

How to spell legend

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce legend

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does legend mean?

1. nounA traditional story handed down through generations, often treated as historical but not verified.
2. nounA person who is extremely famous or admired, especially for outstanding achievement in a field.
3. nounAn explanatory key on a map, chart, or diagram that describes the symbols used.

Legend in a sentence

• The old legend claims a treasure lies beneath the castle ruins.

• The retired striker is considered a legend at the club he served for two decades.

• Check the legend in the corner to learn what each coloured line represents.

• Every village near the lake repeats the same legend about a vanished ship.

• She became a jazz legend whose recordings still sell decades later.

• The chart was useless without a legend to define its symbols.

Where does legend come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Medieval Latin legenda, which literally meant 'things to be read', a form built on the verb legere, meaning 'to read' or 'to gather'. In the Middle Ages a legenda was a written account of a saint's life, the kind of text meant to be read aloud on the saint's feast day. English borrowed the word through Old French around the fourteenth century, at first strictly for these pious narratives. Over time the sense drifted from 'a story read in church' to 'a traditional tale of doubtful truth', and eventually to a famous or admired person whose deeds sound almost too grand to be real. The same legere root survives in everyday relatives such as 'lecture', 'legible', and 'lesson', and the silent gerundive ending is exactly why the word closes on -end rather than the -und an ear might expect.

How the word is built

• leg- (from Latin legere: to read, to gather)
• -end (from the gerundive -enda: things to be done/read)