Lest

How to spell lest

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lest

What does lest mean?

1. conjunctionFor fear that; in order to prevent the possibility that something undesirable happens.

Lest in a sentence

• She wrote down the address lest she forget it before reaching the office.

• The manager double-checked every figure lest a single error slip into the report.

Where does lest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lest descends from the Old English phrase 'thy laes the', which literally meant something like 'whereby less that', built from 'laes', the ancestor of the modern word 'less'. Over the centuries that whole phrase collapsed into a single short conjunction, and the older spelling 'les' eventually gained a final 't', probably by analogy with words that already ended in '-st'. Its core job has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years: it introduces a clause describing something one wishes to prevent or guard against, as in 'for fear that'. Because it sprang from the same root as 'less', you can think of lest as marking the outcome you want to make less likely. It survives today mainly in careful, formal, or literary writing, which is part of why its compact four-letter spelling can feel unfamiliar to write from memory.

How the word is built

• lest (single unit; contracted from Old English 'thy laes the', meaning 'the less that' or 'for fear that')