Nail

How to spell nail

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nail

What does nail mean?

1. nounA small metal spike with a flat head, driven into wood or other material to hold things together.
2. nounThe hard, flat covering at the end of a finger or toe.
3. verbTo fasten something with nails, or informally to do something perfectly.

Nail in a sentence

• noun

  He hammered a nail into the fence post to secure the rail.

• noun

  She broke a nail while opening the stubborn jar lid.

• verb

  The carpenter will nail the loose floorboard back into place.

• noun

  The picture fell because the nail had worked loose from the wall.

• noun

  The salon offers a polish for every nail on both hands.

• verb

  If you rehearse enough, you will nail the presentation tomorrow.

Where does nail come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nail comes straight from the Old English word naegl, which referred both to the horny growth at the end of a finger or toe and to a metal pin or spike used for fastening. That double meaning is very old: the metal nail was named by analogy with the claw or fingernail, since both are hard points driven or jutting out. The word traces back to a shared Germanic root, seen in the Dutch nagel and the German Nagel, and ultimately to an even older Indo-European source that also gave Latin its words for claw and nail. Because the word is native English rather than a later borrowing, its spelling is short and phonetic, with no silent letters or foreign quirks. The figurative verb sense, as in nailing a task or pinning something down, grew naturally from the idea of fixing something firmly in place with a nail.

How the word is built

• nail (single root from Old English nægl: claw, fingernail, metal spike)