Pine

How to spell pine

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pine

What does pine mean?

1. nounAn evergreen coniferous tree with needle-shaped leaves and woody cones.
2. verbTo suffer a deep, persistent longing for someone or something.

Pine in a sentence

• noun

  The cabin was built from local pine harvested in the valley.

• verb

  After moving abroad, she would pine for the food and weather of home.

• noun

  A tall pine stood at the edge of the campsite, shedding needles onto the tent.

• verb

  The old dog seemed to pine for its owner during the long hospital stay.

Where does pine come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The two modern meanings of pine have completely separate origins that happen to look identical. The tree word comes from the Latin pinus, the name for the resinous evergreen, which passed through Old French as 'pin' before settling into English. The verb meaning 'to long for' is much older and entirely native: it descends from Old English 'pinian', 'to torment or cause to suffer', which itself traces back to a Latin loan, 'poena', meaning 'penalty' or 'pain' (the same root that gives us 'pain' and 'penal'). Over the centuries that sense of suffering softened into the gentler idea of wasting away through grief or longing. So although the evergreen tree and the act of yearning are spelled and pronounced the same, they arrived in English along two unrelated paths, one botanical and one rooted in the language of punishment.

How the word is built

• pine (a single Old English root, no prefix or suffix)