Lid

How to spell lid

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lid

What does lid mean?

1. nounA removable or hinged cover for a container such as a pot, box, or jar.

Lid in a sentence

• She pressed the lid firmly onto the jam jar before storing it.

• The saucepan lid rattled as the soup began to boil.

Where does lid come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English hlid, which meant a cover, a gate, or an opening that could be closed. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with relatives such as the Dutch lid and the German Lid (as in Augenlid, eyelid), all tracing back to a root meaning 'to lean' or 'to cover over'. The earliest sense was broad, covering any movable cover that shut an opening, and over the centuries it narrowed mainly to the cover of a container such as a pot, box, or jar. The same word survives in the everyday compound 'eyelid', the cover that closes over the eye. Because lid is short, native, and entirely phonetic, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable from Anglo-Saxon times to the present.

How the word is built

• lid (from Old English hlid: cover, gate)