Pint

How to spell pint

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pint

What does pint mean?

1. nounA unit of liquid volume equal to one eighth of a gallon, or a vessel holding that amount.

Pint in a sentence

• The recipe calls for half a pint of cream.

• He ordered a pint of lager after work.

Where does pint come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the 1300s from the Old French pinte, a unit of liquid measure, and behind that lies a debated trail. The most widely accepted explanation traces it to a Medieval Latin form pincta, meaning 'painted', referring to a painted mark or line on the side of a drinking vessel that showed how much liquid it should hold. From that 'marked measure' the word came to name the quantity itself rather than the line. Spelling stayed compact at four letters even though the vowel is pronounced as a long 'i', which is the one mild oddity for writers. A useful memory hook is that a pint, like a 'point', once pointed to a painted level on the cup, though the exact ancestry remains a little uncertain.

How the word is built

• pint (single root word; no prefix or suffix)