Nit

How to spell nit

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nit

What does nit mean?

1. nounThe egg of a louse, typically found attached to a hair shaft.
2. nounAn informal British term for a silly or foolish person.

Nit in a sentence

• The school nurse checked each child's scalp for any sign of a nit.

• He felt like a complete nit after locking the keys inside the car.

• A fine comb is the best tool for removing every nit from the hair.

• Only a real nit would forget his own wedding anniversary twice.

Where does nit come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English hnitu, meaning the egg of a louse or other small parasitic insect, and it traces back through the same ancient Germanic root that produced the German Niss and the Dutch neet, both naming the same tiny egg. Across the centuries the initial 'h' sound fell silent and then dropped from the spelling, leaving the short, blunt three-letter word we use today. Its core sense has stayed remarkably stable: for well over a thousand years it has named the small whitish egg that clings to a hair shaft. The familiar phrase 'nit-picking', meaning fussy fault-finding over trivial details, grew from the literal, painstaking work of removing these eggs one by one. A separate modern sense, the unit of screen brightness, comes instead from the Latin nitere, meaning 'to shine', so the two meanings only look alike by coincidence.

How the word is built

• nit (single morpheme, from Old English hnitu: egg of a louse)

Words that sound like nit

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

• knit: To make fabric or a garment by interlocking loops of yarn with needles.