Lesson

How to spell lesson

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lesson

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lesson mean?

1. nounA period of instruction in a subject, or something learned from experience.

Lesson in a sentence

• The piano lesson runs for half an hour every Tuesday.

• The failed project taught the team a valuable lesson about deadlines.

Where does lesson come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Lesson comes from the Latin lectio, which literally meant 'a reading' or 'the act of reading aloud', built on legere, meaning 'to read' or 'to gather'. In the medieval church, a lectio was a passage of scripture read out during a service, and that religious sense passed into Old French as lecon, a portion of text to be studied or recited. English borrowed the word in the early 1200s, at first for a scripture reading and soon for any instructive passage a pupil had to learn. From there it broadened into the familiar modern sense of a single session of teaching or a piece of knowledge gained through experience. The same legere root sits inside 'lecture' and 'legible', a useful reminder that the word is built on reading; note too that it sounds exactly like 'lessen', meaning to reduce, which is the main spelling trap to guard against.

How the word is built

• less- (from Latin lectio: a reading)
• -on (noun suffix from Old French)

Words that sound like lesson

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

• lessen: To make something smaller in amount, degree, or intensity, or to become smaller.