Preach

How to spell preach

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce preach

What does preach mean?

1. verbTo deliver a religious sermon, or to urge a belief or course of action insistently.

Preach in a sentence

• The vicar will preach to the congregation every Sunday morning.

• Managers who preach teamwork should model it themselves.

Where does preach come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin praedicare, which meant to proclaim or declare in public; it was built from prae, meaning 'before' or 'in front of others', and dicare, meaning 'to proclaim'. As Christianity spread through the Roman world, praedicare took on the specific sense of declaring the gospel, and in that religious meaning it passed into Old French as prechier. English adopted it from French in the 1100s and 1200s, settling into the form we now spell preach. The same dicare root that gave us 'proclaim' also underlies words like 'predicate' and 'dictate', all of them tied to speaking and declaring. The spelling trap is mild but real: the long 'ee' sound is written 'ea', not 'ee', and the soft ending is 'ch' rather than the harder spellings of similar-sounding words.

How the word is built

• From Latin praedicare: prae- (publicly, before others)
• dicare (to proclaim); in modern English an unanalysed single root.