Rod

How to spell rod

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rod

What does rod mean?

1. nounA thin, straight bar or pole of wood, metal, or other rigid material.

Rod in a sentence

• The curtain hung from a brass rod above the window.

• He threaded the line through every eye on the fishing rod.

Where does rod come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Rod comes from the Old English 'rodd', meaning a slender stick, pole, or shoot of wood, and it is a native Germanic word rather than a borrowing. It is closely related to Old Norse 'rudda', a word for a club or heavy stick, which points to a shared northern Germanic ancestor. The basic idea has always been a thin, straight length of material, and from that the word branched into many practical senses: a stick used for punishment, a fishing implement, a curtain support, and a metal bar in engineering. In older measuring systems a rod was also a fixed unit of length, roughly five and a half yards, derived from the actual measuring pole that surveyors carried. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, its spelling has stayed almost unchanged for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• rod (a single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)