Nee

How to spell nee

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nee

What does nee mean?

1. adjectiveUsed to introduce the family surname a married woman had at birth, before marriage.

Nee in a sentence

• The guest list named Margaret Hughes, nee Thompson, as the keynote speaker.

• Her obituary listed her as Eleanor Price, nee Davenport, of Bristol.

Where does nee come from?

Language of origin: French

This little word comes straight from French, where 'née' is the feminine past participle of the verb naître, meaning 'to be born'. The masculine form is 'né', so a woman is 'née' and a man would be 'né', though English overwhelmingly uses the feminine form. The verb naître descends from the Latin nasci, 'to be born', which is also the ancestor of words like 'native', 'nativity', 'nascent' and 'innate'. English adopted the term in the eighteenth century as a tidy way of introducing a married woman's family surname, as in 'Mrs Jane Smith, née Brown', literally meaning 'born Brown'. In its French origin the word carries an acute accent over the first e and often a second e, but in everyday English writing it is frequently stripped down to the bare 'nee', which is the spelling trap: the silent doubled vowel ends in a long 'ay' sound rather than the 'ee' the spelling seems to promise.

How the word is built

• nee (French feminine past participle of naître, 'to be born')

Words that sound like nee

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• nay: An old-fashioned or formal word for 'no', used to give a negative answer.