Plight

How to spell plight

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plight

What does plight mean?

1. nounA dangerous, difficult, or unfortunate situation.

Plight in a sentence

• The charity raised funds to ease the plight of refugees stranded at the border.

• The report described the desperate plight of families unable to pay their heating bills.

Where does plight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Plight is really two old words that fell together into one spelling. The sense most adults use today, meaning a difficult or dangerous situation, comes from Anglo-French 'plit', a variant of Old French 'pleit' meaning a fold, and behind that lies the Latin verb 'plicare', 'to fold'; the idea moved from a literal fold to a 'condition' someone finds themselves wrapped up in. The same Latin 'plicare' gives us 'pleat', 'plait', and even 'complicated'. The second sense, the solemn promise as in to plight one's troth, descends instead from Old English 'pliht', meaning danger, risk, or liability, a relative of the German 'Pflicht', 'duty'; to plight something originally meant to put it at risk or pledge it as security. The silent 'gh' that trips up writers preserves an old Germanic guttural sound that English long ago stopped pronouncing, the same fossilised cluster seen in 'light', 'night', and 'fright'.

How the word is built

• plight (single root; no separable affixes). Historically two words merged: Old English 'pliht' (danger, risk) and Anglo-French 'plit' (a fold or condition, from Latin 'plicare', to fold).