Month

How to spell month

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce month

What does month mean?

1. nounAny of the twelve named divisions of a calendar year, or a period of roughly thirty days.

Month in a sentence

• The rent is due on the first day of every month.

• She booked the holiday for the warmest month of the year.

Where does month come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English mōnað, the name for one of the divisions of the year, and it is directly related to mōna, the Old English word for the moon. The connection is not accidental: early Germanic peoples measured time by the cycles of the moon, so a month was literally a moon-period, the span from one new moon to the next. The same ancestry runs through the related Germanic forms, such as Old Norse mánaðr and Old High German mānod, all sharing a root that linked the moon and the measure of time. Over the centuries the spelling shifted and the vowel sound moved away from that of moon, which is why month now sounds nothing like its lunar relative. That hidden link to moon is a useful memory aid for the silent visual logic of the spelling, even though the modern pronunciation has drifted to a short vowel.

How the word is built

• month (from Old English mōnað, a measure of time tied to the moon)