Lump

How to spell lump

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lump

What does lump mean?

1. nounA compact, often shapeless piece or swelling of something.
2. verbTo group different things together, treating them as one category.

Lump in a sentence

• noun

  She stirred the sauce hard to break up every lump of flour.

• verb

  The report tends to lump all the small expenses into one line.

• noun

  The doctor examined a small lump on his shoulder.

• verb

  Critics often lump very different writers under a single label.

Where does lump come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word lump appears in English from around the 1300s, and its earliest sense was simply a shapeless mass or compact piece of something. Its exact origin is genuinely uncertain, but scholars connect it to a wider family of similar-sounding words in the Germanic languages of northern Europe, such as the Danish and Norwegian 'lump' and the Dutch 'lomp', which carried ideas of a rough, heavy, clumsy chunk. Some of these relatives also meant a rag or a coarse, ungainly thing, which fits the way English later used lump for a thick-set or sluggish person. The figurative phrase 'to lump together' (to bundle unlike things into one group) grew naturally out of the noun by the 1600s, and the resigned expression 'to lump it' (to put up with something unwelcome) followed later. Because the word is short, blunt, and ends in a crisp 'mp' cluster, its spelling has stayed stable and presents few traps for modern writers.

How the word is built

• lump (a shapeless mass; a single root word with no prefix or suffix)