Out

How to spell out

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce out

What does out mean?

1. adverbAway from the inside, or away from a particular place or state.
2. adjectiveNot at home, not available, or no longer in play or in fashion.
3. prepositionThrough and beyond an opening or boundary, as in 'out of'.

Out in a sentence

• adverb

  She stepped out into the cold morning air.

• adjective

  The manager is out of the office until Thursday.

• preposition

  The cat leapt out the window and onto the fence.

• adverb

  The lights went out during the storm.

• adjective

  That style of jacket is completely out this season.

• preposition

  He glanced out the train door before it closed.

Where does out come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from Old English ut, meaning 'away' or 'outward', and it has cousins right across the Germanic family, including Dutch uit and German aus, all tracing back to a shared Proto-Germanic root meaning 'outward' or 'away from'. Far older still, it links to a Proto-Indo-European root ud, carrying the sense of 'up' or 'out', which also survives in Sanskrit and other ancient tongues. For more than a thousand years the spelling has stayed strikingly stable, and the modern ou is simply how English came to represent the long vowel that Old English wrote with a plain u. The word has been astonishingly productive, fathering compounds and phrasal verbs by the hundred, from outlook and outcome to break out and sort out. Because it is so short and so familiar, out is one of the rare English words that almost never causes a spelling problem.

How the word is built

• out (Old English ut: away, outward); a single unanalysable root word