Reed

How to spell reed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce reed

What does reed mean?

1. nounA tall slender grass that grows in or near shallow water.
2. nounA thin strip of cane or metal in a wind instrument that vibrates to produce sound.

Reed in a sentence

• A heron stood motionless among the tall reed at the lake edge.

• The clarinettist soaked a fresh reed before the concert.

• Thatched roofs in the village are still made from dried reed.

• A cracked reed will ruin the tone of an oboe.

Where does reed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English hreod, meaning a tall water grass, and it has kept that core sense for well over a thousand years. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in Old Saxon hriod and Dutch riet, all describing the slender stalks that grow at the edges of rivers and marshes. Because dried reeds were hollow and springy, the name was naturally borrowed for the thin sliver of cane that vibrates inside woodwind instruments such as the oboe and clarinet, a sense recorded in English by the medieval period. The spelling trap is purely auditory: reed sounds exactly like read, the present tense of the verb meaning to take in written words, so the doubled ee that marks the plant has to be remembered rather than heard. Holding on to that ee, as in the related word weed, is the surest way to keep the two apart.

How the word is built

• reed (single root word, from Old English hreod)

Words that sound like reed

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• read: To look at written or printed words and understand their meaning.