Pen

How to spell pen

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pen

What does pen mean?

1. nounA handheld instrument that uses ink to write or draw.
2. nounA small fenced area for keeping livestock or other animals.
3. verbTo compose or write something by hand.

Pen in a sentence

• noun

  She signed the contract with a black pen.

• noun

  The farmer drove the sheep back into the pen at dusk.

• verb

  She sat down to pen a long letter to her sister.

• noun

  The cheap pen ran out of ink halfway through the meeting.

• noun

  The pigs rooted around in the muddy pen behind the barn.

• verb

  The author was asked to pen a foreword for the new edition.

Where does pen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word actually braids together two unrelated origins that ended up spelled and sounded the same. The writing instrument comes from the Latin penna, meaning 'feather' or 'quill', because for centuries people wrote by dipping a sharpened bird's feather in ink; this passed through Old French penne before settling into English in the 1300s, and the modern metal-nibbed and ballpoint tools simply kept the old name. The enclosure sense is a separate, much older native word, the Old English penn meaning a small fold or coop for animals, with no connection to feathers at all. The verb 'to pen', meaning to write, grew naturally out of the writing-tool noun, while 'to pen' meaning to shut in grew out of the animal-fold noun. So the spelling trap here is conceptual rather than visual: a short, plain three-letter word carrying two completely different family histories.

How the word is built

• pen (single root word; the writing sense from Latin penna 'feather', the enclosure sense from Old English penn 'fold')