Mine

How to spell mine

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mine

What does mine mean?

1. pronounBelonging to or associated with the speaker.
2. nounAn underground excavation from which coal, ore, or other minerals are extracted.
3. verbTo dig in the earth to extract coal, metal, or other minerals.
4. nounA concealed explosive device placed underground or in water to destroy passing vehicles or vessels.

Mine in a sentence

• pronoun

  The red umbrella by the door is mine.

• noun

  The old coal mine closed decades ago.

• verb

  The company plans to mine copper in the valley.

• noun

  The patrol carefully avoided the buried land mine.

• pronoun

  That parking space has always been mine.

• noun

  Workers descended into the mine at dawn.

Where does mine come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This short word carries two quite different histories under one spelling. The possessive pronoun descends from Old English 'min', meaning 'belonging to me', a native Germanic form closely related to the German 'mein' and ultimately to the same ancient root that gives us 'me'. The mining sense arrived much later, around the 1300s, from the Old French 'mine', meaning an underground excavation or a vein of ore, possibly drawn from a Celtic word for ore. From that excavation sense came the verb 'to mine', meaning to dig minerals from the ground. The explosive 'mine' is a figurative extension: early military engineers dug tunnels (mines) beneath enemy walls and packed them with gunpowder, so the buried charge itself came to be called a mine. All of these meanings settled on the same four-letter spelling, which is why this everyday word juggles so many roles.

How the word is built

• mine (a single root; the possessive from Old English min, the excavation/explosive senses from a separate Old French root)