Prize

How to spell prize

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce prize

What does prize mean?

1. nounA reward given to the winner of a contest, competition, or lottery.
2. verbTo value something very highly or treasure it.

Prize in a sentence

• noun

  The first prize in the raffle was a weekend holiday.

• verb

  Older collectors prize stamps that have never been used.

• noun

  She collected her prize at the awards ceremony.

• verb

  Good employers prize honesty above almost everything else.

Where does prize come from?

Language of origin: French

Prize comes ultimately from the Latin pretium, meaning 'price, value, or worth', which also gave us 'price', 'precious', and 'appreciate'. It travelled into English through Old French, where the noun pris meant the price of something and the related feminine form prise meant 'a taking' or 'a thing seized'. By the late Middle Ages English had absorbed it as the reward won in a contest, the very thing seized as the spoils of victory, and from there the modern sense of an award handed to a winner developed. The verb meaning 'to value highly' grew naturally from the same idea of reckoning something's worth. A separate strand, the meaning 'to force open with a lever', comes from that French prise 'a grip or hold'; British and Canadian writers often spell that lever sense 'prise', while American spelling keeps 'prize' throughout, which is why the spellings can blur across the Atlantic.

How the word is built

• prize (from Old French pris/prise: price, value, reward); single root, no affixes