Nurse

How to spell nurse

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nurse

What does nurse mean?

1. nounA person trained to care for the sick or injured, usually working alongside doctors.
2. verbTo care for someone who is ill, or to hold and tend something gently.

Nurse in a sentence

• noun

  The nurse checked his blood pressure before the doctor arrived.

• verb

  She stayed home to nurse her husband back to health.

• noun

  She trained for three years to qualify as a nurse.

• verb

  He liked to nurse a single coffee for the whole afternoon.

Where does nurse come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word travelled into English from Old French norrice or nurice, meaning a woman employed to suckle and care for another's child. That French form descended from the Late Latin nutricia, built on the noun nutrix, meaning a wet-nurse or one who nourishes, which in turn came from the verb nutrire, meaning to feed, nourish, or bring up. So the earliest sense in English, recorded from the 1300s, was specifically the woman who breastfed and tended an infant; only later, from the 1500s onward, did it broaden to anyone who tends the sick, and eventually to the trained medical professional we mean today. The same nutrire root still feeds the English words nutrition, nourish, and nutrient, which is a useful reminder that the heart of nurse is the idea of feeding and sustaining. The spelling is short and phonetic, so the chief trap is simply the ur vowel rather than any silent letters.

How the word is built

• nurs- (from Latin nutrix: one who nourishes or suckles)
• -e