Peat

How to spell peat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce peat

What does peat mean?

1. nounA dark, partly decomposed plant material formed in waterlogged bogs, used as fuel and in gardening.

Peat in a sentence

• The cottage was heated by burning blocks of peat cut from the bog.

• The gardener mixed peat into the soil to help the seedlings retain moisture.

Where does peat come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

Peat comes into English from Anglo-Latin peta, recorded in medieval Britain to mean a piece of turf cut from the ground, and the word is most likely Celtic in ultimate origin, related to terms for a clod or lump of earth. From the 1300s onward it described the dark, spongy material formed when mosses and other bog plants partly decay in waterlogged, oxygen-poor ground over thousands of years. Because dried blocks of it burn slowly and steadily, peat became a vital household fuel across Ireland, Scotland and other wet uplands, and that fuel sense remains its most familiar meaning. The same material is now prized by gardeners as a soil conditioner and by whisky distillers, whose smoke gives certain malts their distinctive smoky flavour. The spelling keeps the simple ea vowel of many short English words, and its only real trap is that it sounds exactly like the name Pete.

How the word is built

• peat (a single root noun; from Anglo-Latin peta, a piece of cut turf)