Lush

How to spell lush

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lush

What does lush mean?

1. adjectiveGrowing thickly and abundantly; richly green and healthy.

Lush in a sentence

• The valley was carpeted in lush green meadows after the spring rains.

• Years of careful watering turned the back garden into a lush retreat.

Where does lush come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origins of 'lush' are genuinely murky, and scholars disagree about how it arrived. The earliest sense, recorded in the fifteenth century, described something soft, succulent, or tender, especially fresh growth, and it may be a shortened reworking of the older adjective 'lascious' or 'luscious', meaning sweet and delicious. From soft and juicy plants the word naturally broadened to mean abundant, thick, and richly green, the modern landscape sense. The slang noun for a heavy drinker emerged separately in the nineteenth century, possibly because 'lush' was eighteenth-century cant for beer or strong drink. Because the word is so short and its history so tangled, it has no useful root parts to break down, which is part of why it feels deceptively simple. The single 'sh' spelling and the short vowel make it phonetically transparent, so it almost never trips up adult writers.

How the word is built

• single root 'lush' (no prefix or suffix); not built from smaller meaningful parts