Lime

How to spell lime

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lime

What does lime mean?

1. nounA small green citrus fruit with sharp, sour juice, used in drinks and cooking.
2. nounA white caustic substance (calcium oxide or hydroxide) made from limestone and used in building and farming.
3. nounA broad-leaved deciduous tree, also called the linden, with heart-shaped leaves and fragrant flowers.

Lime in a sentence

• She squeezed half a lime over the grilled fish.

• The farmer spread lime on the field to reduce the acidity of the soil.

• An avenue of lime trees lined the road up to the manor house.

• The recipe calls for the zest of one lime and a little sugar.

• The old wall was held together with sand and lime mortar.

• Bees gathered around the scented blossom of the old lime in summer.

Where does lime come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Lime is really several words that ended up spelled the same way. The mineral sense, the white caustic substance made by burning limestone, comes straight from Old English lim, a Germanic word meaning a sticky or binding substance such as birdlime or mortar, and relatives survive in German Leim 'glue'. The tree sense (the lime or linden) is also native, an altered form of the older English word lind, with the shape lime appearing by the 1600s. The citrus sense has a completely different and much more exotic journey: English borrowed it in the 1600s from French lime, which came through Spanish and Provencal from Arabic limah, a collective name for citrus fruit, ultimately reaching Arabic from Persian limu. Because all three threads collapsed onto the same four letters, lime carries the unusual distinction of being one short, simple word with three unrelated family trees. The fruit and the colour named after it are the senses most people reach for today, but the mineral meaning is why gardeners and builders still 'lime' soil and mix lime mortar.

How the word is built

• lime (a single root word, no prefix or suffix; the citrus sense traces to Arabic via French, while the mineral and tree senses are native Old English)