Never

How to spell never

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce never

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does never mean?

1. adverbAt no time, on no occasion, or not at all.

Never in a sentence

• She has never missed a single day of work in twenty years.

• The old printer never jams when you load the paper carefully.

Where does never come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word never comes straight from Old English 'næfre', a tight contraction of 'ne', meaning 'not', and 'æfre', meaning 'ever'. In other words, the original sense was literally 'not ever', a flat denial stretched across all time. This puts it in the same family as the modern pair 'no' and 'ever', and it shows how Anglo-Saxon speakers liked to fuse a negative particle onto a following word. The form settled into 'never' over the Middle English period as the older vowel cluster simplified. Because it has been a core everyday word since before the Norman Conquest, its spelling has stayed plain and regular, with none of the doubled letters or silent traps that later French and Latin borrowings brought into English.

How the word is built

• ne- (not)
• -ver (from Old English 'æfre', ever)