Rut

How to spell rut

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rut

What does rut mean?

1. nounA deep track worn into ground by wheels, or by extension a dull, fixed routine that is hard to escape.
2. nounThe annual period of sexual activity in male deer and certain other mammals.

Rut in a sentence

• The tractor left a deep rut across the muddy field.

• During the autumn rut the stags bellow across the hillside.

• After ten years in the same job he felt trapped in a rut.

• A bull elephant in rut can become dangerously aggressive.

Where does rut come from?

Language of origin: French

The word actually has two separate stories that happen to land on the same spelling. The familiar 'groove worn by wheels' sense reached English in the sixteenth century, most likely from Old French rute, the source of our modern 'route', which traces back to the Latin phrase via rupta, meaning 'a road broken (through)', from rumpere, 'to break'. A rut, then, is literally a track broken into the ground, and the figurative 'stuck in a rut' grew naturally from the image of a wheel that cannot climb out of its own worn groove. The unrelated animal sense, the period when deer and other mammals are driven to mate, came earlier through Old French rut from Late Latin rugitus, meaning 'a roaring' or 'bellowing', from rugire, 'to roar', echoing the loud calls a stag makes in the season. Because the word is so short, the spelling holds no real trap; the only thing to keep straight is the single t and the single closing consonant.

How the word is built

• single root rut (no prefix or suffix); a short, self-contained Germanic-French monosyllable