Raw

How to spell raw

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce raw

What does raw mean?

1. adjectiveOf food, not cooked or only partly cooked.
2. adjectiveIn a natural state; not yet processed, refined, or analysed.
3. adjectiveOf skin, painfully sore, chafed, or with the surface rubbed away.

Raw in a sentence

• The recipe calls for grated raw carrot and a squeeze of lemon.

• The factory imports raw cotton and spins it into thread.

• The new boots left the back of his heel red and raw.

• Eating raw chicken can make you seriously ill.

• The analysts asked for the raw data before any figures were summarised.

• Hours of scrubbing left her hands chapped and raw.

Where does raw come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Raw descends from the Old English hrēaw, meaning 'uncooked' or 'not prepared by fire', and it belongs to a wide Germanic family that includes Dutch rauw and German roh, all carrying the same sense of food that has not been cooked. Scholars trace the whole group back to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'bloody' or 'raw flesh', which is also the distant relative of the Latin cruor 'gore' and crudus 'raw, undigested', the source of our word 'crude'. Over the centuries the spelling lost the early 'h' sound and the trailing vowel, settling into the tidy three letters we use today. The meaning broadened well beyond the kitchen: by the medieval period English speakers were applying raw to skin that had been rubbed sore, to unprocessed materials, and to people who were inexperienced or 'green'. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the only thing to remember is the 'aw' spelling of the vowel rather than 'or' or 'au'.

How the word is built

• raw (single native root; no prefix or suffix, from Old English hrēaw 'uncooked')