Of

How to spell of

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce of

What does of mean?

1. prepositionUsed to show belonging, origin, contents, or relationship between two things.

Of in a sentence

• The keys of the office are kept in a locked drawer.

• She poured a cup of coffee before the meeting started.

Where does of come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word 'of' descends directly from Old English 'of', an unstressed form that originally meant 'away' or 'away from', signalling motion or separation. It is the very same word as the adverb and preposition 'off', and the two were a single word for centuries before English gradually split them: 'off' kept the strong, stressed sense of departure while 'of' settled into the weak, grammatical sense of belonging, origin, and material. The root traces back to the Proto-Germanic 'aba' and ultimately to the Proto-Indo-European 'apo' meaning 'away' or 'from', which is also the source of Latin 'ab' (as in 'absent') and Greek 'apo' (as in 'apostrophe'). Because 'of' is almost always spoken in a reduced, unstressed way that sounds like 'uv', many writers carelessly type 'of' where the verb 'have' belongs, producing the very common error 'would of' for 'would have'. That mismatch between sound and spelling is the only real trap in such a short, everyday word.

How the word is built

• of (single Old English particle, not decomposable into prefix/root/suffix)