Lung

How to spell lung

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lung

What does lung mean?

1. nounEither of the two organs in the chest that take in air so the body can absorb oxygen.

Lung in a sentence

• The scan showed a small shadow on her left lung.

• Years of smoking had damaged the tissue of each lung.

Where does lung come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word lung comes from the Old English lungen, the name for the breathing organ in the chest. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root that also produced the German Lunge and the Dutch long, and that root is connected to the idea of lightness, as in 'light in weight'. The link is wonderfully concrete: lungs are spongy and full of air, so they are the lightest organs in the body, and butchers long noticed that pieces of lung float in water while heavier meat sinks. The same lightness sense survives in the related word 'lights', an old butcher's term for animal lungs sold as offal. Because the spelling stayed close to its plain Germanic original, the only modern trap is the silent-feeling -ng cluster at the end.

How the word is built

• lung (single root; from Old English lungen, related to 'light' in weight)