Melon

How to spell melon

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce melon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does melon mean?

1. nounA large round fruit with sweet juicy flesh and many seeds, grown on a trailing vine.

Melon in a sentence

• She sliced the melon into thick wedges for breakfast.

• A ripe melon should feel heavy and smell faintly sweet at the stem.

Where does melon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word melon comes through Old French from the Late Latin melonem, a shortened form of melopepo, which Latin itself had borrowed from the Greek mēlopepon. That Greek compound joined mēlon, meaning 'apple' or more generally any round tree fruit, with pepon, meaning 'ripe' or 'cooked by the sun', so the original sense was something like 'a gourd ripened to softness'. English picked it up in the late 1300s to describe the large round fruit of trailing vines, and over time the name attached firmly to the sweet, juicy summer varieties we know today. The Greek mēlon also lurks behind 'marmalade', which travelled by way of a quince preserve, and behind the botanical name for the apple-like fruits. Spelling is rarely a problem here, since melon simply doubles nothing and follows its plain phonetic shape.

How the word is built

• melon (from Greek mēlopepon: apple-gourd)