Pyramid

How to spell pyramid

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pyramid

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pyramid mean?

1. nounA solid or structure with a polygonal base and sloping sides that meet at a single point on top.
2. nounA diagram or structure shaped to show ranked layers, with a broad base narrowing to a small top.

Pyramid in a sentence

• The tour guide explained how each pyramid was built from millions of stone blocks.

• The dietician showed a food pyramid with grains at the bottom and sweets at the top.

• The children stacked the wooden blocks into a neat pyramid on the floor.

• The company chart formed a pyramid, with one chief executive above many staff.

Where does pyramid come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek pyramis, genitive pyramidos, which was the name the ancient Greeks gave to the great stone monuments of Egypt. The deeper origin is debated, but a widely cited idea links it to the Egyptian word for these structures rather than to any Greek root, with the Greeks reshaping the foreign term into a form their own language could handle. An old and charming but unreliable folk explanation connected it to pyros, the Greek word for wheat, imagining the shape of a conical cake; scholars now treat that as a coincidence of sound rather than a true source. Latin took the word over as pyramis, and English received it in the 1300s, eventually settling on the modern spelling pyramid. The single y near the front, where many writers expect an i, is the lasting fingerprint of that Greek ancestry, since Greek upsilon was regularly rendered as y in words that passed through Latin.

How the word is built

• pyramid (from Greek pyramis, genitive pyramidos: a pyramid); not built from separable English prefixes or suffixes