Mound

How to spell mound

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mound

What does mound mean?

1. nounA rounded raised pile of earth, stones, or other material.
2. verbTo heap or pile material into a rounded mass.

Mound in a sentence

• noun

  The gardener raked the clippings into a neat mound by the fence.

• verb

  Workers mound the gravel against the wall to slow the floodwater.

• noun

  Archaeologists carefully excavated the ancient burial mound.

• verb

  Chefs often mound the rice in the centre of the plate.

Where does mound come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The history of mound is genuinely tangled, which is why it earns only medium confidence. The form looks like Old English mund, which meant a hand, and by extension protection or guardianship, the same sense preserved in old legal terms and personal names. In late medieval and early modern English the word also carried the idea of a hedge, fence, or earthwork boundary that protected land, and from there the modern sense of a heaped bank or pile of earth emerged around the sixteenth century. Scholars suspect the everyday heap sense was reinforced by similar Low German and Dutch words for protective embankments. The pleasing oddity is that a word once about the human hand and the act of safeguarding now simply means a lump of soil. For spelling, the trap is mild: the ound rhymes with round and sound, and the silent threat is only the temptation to write mownd.

How the word is built

• mound (single root, no affixes; from earlier mund meaning hand or protection)