Lounge

How to spell lounge

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lounge

What does lounge mean?

1. nounA comfortable room or public area set aside for sitting and relaxing.
2. verbTo sit or lie back in a relaxed, lazy way.

Lounge in a sentence

• noun

  The family gathered in the lounge to watch the evening news.

• verb

  On Sunday mornings she likes to lounge on the sofa with a coffee.

• noun

  Passengers with business tickets can wait in the airport lounge.

• verb

  The cat would lounge in the warm patch of sunlight by the window.

Where does lounge come from?

Language of origin: Other

The origins of lounge are genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries hedge their entries. It first appears in Scots and northern English in the 1500s as a verb meaning to move or loll about idly, and one widely repeated suggestion traces it to the obsolete word lungis, meaning a tall, slow, lazy fellow. That lungis is thought to come from French longis, a name once popularly attached to Longinus, the soldier of medieval legend who pierced Christ on the cross and whose name became a byword for a dawdling idler. The noun sense, a place where one can lounge, came later, with the comfortable sitting room recorded from the eighteenth century and the public waiting room (as in airport or hotel lounge) following in the nineteenth and twentieth. Because the word is not built from familiar Latin or Greek roots, its spelling has to be learned whole, and the silent, soft g spelled as -nge is the part that trips writers up.

How the word is built

• lounge (single root, of uncertain origin; no separable prefix or suffix)