Ouch

How to spell ouch

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ouch

What does ouch mean?

1. interjectionA sudden exclamation expressing physical pain or, by extension, sympathy or dismay at something painful or costly.

Ouch in a sentence

• A loud ouch escaped her as the needle pierced her finger.

• He let out a sharp ouch when he stubbed his toe on the doorframe.

Where does ouch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ouch is an exclamation that imitates the sharp sound a person makes when suddenly hurt, and it appears in American English from the early nineteenth century. Its form is usually traced to the German autsch, a cry of pain that means much the same thing, brought into American usage through Pennsylvania German communities descended from German speaking settlers. As an imitative word it belongs to the same family of natural reaction noises as 'ow' and 'ah', sounds that languages tend to invent independently rather than borrow. Over time it broadened beyond physical pain to mark sympathy for someone else's misfortune or to react to an unpleasant cost or remark. The spelling is short and phonetic, which keeps it easy, though the 'ou' plus 'ch' ending follows the same pattern as 'couch' and 'pouch'.

How the word is built

• ouch (a single imitative root; an exclamation with no prefix or suffix)