Mint

How to spell mint

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mint

What does mint mean?

1. nounAn aromatic herb with cool-tasting leaves, used to flavour food and drinks.
2. nounA small sweet flavoured with peppermint or spearmint.
3. nounA place where coins or currency are officially manufactured.
4. verbTo manufacture a coin, or to invent a new word or phrase.
5. adjectiveIn perfect, unspoiled condition, as if brand new.

Mint in a sentence

• noun

  She stirred a few leaves of fresh mint into the iced tea.

• noun

  He offered everyone a mint after the meal.

• noun

  The new commemorative coins were struck at the royal mint.

• verb

  The treasury planned to mint a special coin for the anniversary.

• adjective

  The collector kept the vinyl record in mint condition.

• noun

  The lamb was served with a traditional mint sauce.

Where does mint come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is really two old words that ended up spelled the same way. The plant sense comes from the Latin menta (also mentha), the name of the fragrant herb, which the Romans in turn borrowed from Greek minthe; in classical myth Minthe was a nymph turned into the sweet-smelling plant. The money senses trace to a completely separate source: the Latin moneta, meaning 'mint' or 'money', a title of the goddess Juno near whose temple Roman coins were struck. That word travelled into Old English as mynet, meaning 'coin', and gradually came to mean the place where coins are made and then the act of making them. Because both menta and moneta were reshaped by English speakers into the same short, blunt form, we now have one tidy spelling carrying two unrelated histories, which is why the word feels so simple yet covers herbs, sweets, coins and pristine condition.

How the word is built

• mint (single root, no affixes; from Old English mynet 'coin' for the money senses, and from Latin menta 'the herb' for the plant sense)