Owner

How to spell owner

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce owner

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does owner mean?

1. nounA person who owns or legally possesses something.

Owner in a sentence

• The new owner of the cafe repainted the entire front window.

• The dog ran straight back to its owner in the car park.

Where does owner come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the verb and adjective 'own', which descends from the Old English āgen, meaning 'one's own' or 'possessed', itself the past participle of āgan, 'to have' or 'to possess'. The agent suffix '-er', also of native Germanic stock, was added to form a noun meaning 'a person who owns', a pattern English uses freely to turn verbs into doers (teach gives teacher, drive gives driver). The form 'owner' is recorded from around the late fourteenth century, and it has stayed remarkably stable in both sense and spelling ever since. The same āgen root sits behind the everyday word 'own' itself and survives in the slightly archaic verb 'owe', which once also meant 'to possess' before narrowing to mean 'to be in debt'. Because the spelling simply joins 'own' and 'er', the only thing to keep an eye on is the silent 'w' that the base word carries through unchanged.

How the word is built

• own (from Old English āgen: possessed, one's own)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does or has)