Psych

How to spell psych

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce psych

What does psych mean?

1. verbTo prepare oneself mentally, or to unsettle an opponent, through deliberate mental effort.
2. nounAn informal short name for psychology, especially as a course or subject.
3. interjectionA casual exclamation used after fooling someone, meaning 'I tricked you'.

Psych in a sentence

• verb

  She had to psych herself up before the job interview.

• noun

  She chose psych as her elective in the first term.

• interjection

  She shouted psych as soon as the joke was revealed.

• verb

  The rival team tried to psych out our captain before the match.

• noun

  The psych lecture covered memory and conditioning.

• interjection

  He yelled psych after pretending he had lost the keys.

Where does psych come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern clipping of the older word psyche, which English took from the Greek psukhe, meaning 'breath', 'life', or 'soul', and which later came to mean the mind itself. The Greeks personified Psyche as a young woman beloved by Eros, and the root spread into a whole family of scholarly terms such as psychology and psychiatry during the 1800s. The short slangy form psych emerged in twentieth century American English, first inside student talk for a psychology course and then as a verb in sport and competition, as in to psych someone out or psych yourself up. The deliberately retained silent p and the unusual -ych ending are inherited straight from the Greek spelling, and they are exactly what trips writers up, since the word sounds simply like 'sike'. As an exclamation meaning 'I fooled you', it became popular in casual speech in the late 1900s, where it is sometimes respelled phonetically as 'sike'.

How the word is built

• psych- (from Greek psukhe: soul, mind), a clipped form of psyche or psychology