Reminder

How to spell reminder

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce reminder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reminder mean?

1. nounSomething that causes a person to remember or take note of a fact, task, or appointment.

Reminder in a sentence

• The app sent a reminder an hour before the dentist appointment.

• She stuck a reminder on the fridge to buy milk on the way home.

Where does reminder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the verb 'remind', which itself joins the Latin-derived prefix 're-' (meaning 'again') to the native English word 'mind', so that to remind someone is literally to bring something back into their mind. The noun 'mind' descends from Old English 'gemynd', meaning 'memory' or 'the act of remembering', a word rooted in an ancient Indo-European base for thinking that also gave us 'mental' and 'monitor'. The verb 'remind' appeared in English in the 1600s, and 'reminder', formed by adding the agent suffix '-er' for the thing that does the reminding, followed soon after. The spelling stays pleasingly regular: 're' plus 'mind' plus 'er', with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip over. The only quiet trap is the unstressed final '-er', which some writers second-guess against the rarer '-or' ending seen in words like 'advisor'.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• mind (to bring to mind, from Old English gemynd 'memory')
• -er (noun: thing that does)