Notch

How to spell notch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce notch

What does notch mean?

1. nounA V-shaped cut or indentation made in an edge or surface.
2. nounA level or degree on an imagined scale of quality or intensity.
3. verbTo make a notch in something, or to score or achieve a result.

Notch in a sentence

• noun

  He cut a small notch into the wooden post to mark the height.

• noun

  The new manager raised the team's performance a notch higher.

• verb

  The carpenter will notch the beam so the joint fits snugly.

• noun

  The belt had an extra notch for a tighter fit.

• noun

  This restaurant is a notch above the others in town.

• verb

  The runners hope to notch another win this weekend.

Where does notch come from?

Language of origin: French

Notch first appears in English in the late 1500s and almost certainly arose from a slip of the ear. English speakers borrowed the Old French word oche, meaning a nick, groove, or tally mark cut into wood, but the phrase 'an oche' was repeatedly misheard and rewritten as 'a notch', so the n that really belonged to the article 'an' became glued onto the noun. This same kind of mishearing, technically called false splitting, is exactly what produced 'a nickname' from 'an ekename' and stripped the n from 'a napron' to give us 'an apron'. The underlying French oche may go back to a Late Latin or pre-Latin word for cutting, though the trail is uncertain. The everyday spelling trap is mild: the silent t inside the -tch cluster is easy to drop, since the word sounds simply like 'noch'.

How the word is built

• notch (single root; from misdivided French oche 'a nick or groove')