Melt

How to spell melt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce melt

What does melt mean?

1. verbTo change from a solid into a liquid, usually by heating.
2. nounThe process or rate of melting, or molten material itself.

Melt in a sentence

• verb

  Warm sunshine will melt the snow on the driveway.

• noun

  The spring melt swelled the river beyond its banks.

• verb

  Butter begins to melt as soon as it hits the hot pan.

• noun

  Engineers measured the temperature of the steel melt before pouring it.

Where does melt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Melt comes from the Old English verb meltan, meaning 'to become liquid' or 'to dissolve', which traces back to a Germanic root shared with related words across the northern European languages. That root is also connected to the idea of something soft or yielding, the same family that gives us 'mild' and 'smelt' (the metalworking sense of melting ore). For centuries English actually kept two related verbs side by side: an intransitive meltan, 'to melt away', and a causative myltan, 'to make melt', which is why older texts sometimes show forms like 'molten'. Over time the spellings merged into the single regular verb we use today, while 'molten' survived as a frozen adjective for liquefied metal or rock. The word has barely changed shape in a thousand years, which is part of why its simple four-letter spelling causes no trouble.

How the word is built

• melt (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)