Mist
nounA thin cloud of tiny water droplets in the air near the ground, reducing visibility.
How to spell mist
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce mist
What does mist mean?
- nounA thin cloud of tiny water droplets in the air near the ground, reducing visibility.
- verbTo cover or spray something with a fine layer of tiny droplets.
Mist in a sentence
-
noun
A thick mist rolled across the valley at dawn.
-
verb
She likes to mist her houseplants every few days.
-
noun
The mountain peak vanished into the morning mist.
-
verb
Gardeners often mist the seedlings to keep them moist.
Where does mist come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word comes from Old English 'mist', meaning a dimness of the air or a haze of fine water droplets. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root that also gave Dutch 'mist' and is related to words in the Scandinavian languages. Further back, the ancestral root carried a sense of 'cloudiness' or 'urine spray', linked to the same Indo-European source as the Sanskrit word for drizzle or fog. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, which is why it looks so plain compared with its French or Latin neighbours. Its main spelling trap is purely a sound one: it is a perfect homophone of 'missed', the past tense of 'miss', so the difficulty lies in choosing the right word rather than the right letters.
How the word is built
- mist (single root from Old English 'mist', meaning fog or haze); no prefix or suffix
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.