Saga

How to spell saga

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce saga

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does saga mean?

1. nounA long, detailed story, especially one covering many years or several generations.
2. nounA long and complicated series of events or troubles, often described informally.

Saga in a sentence

• The novel is a sweeping family saga set across three generations.

• Getting the refund turned into a month-long saga of phone calls and emails.

• She spent the winter reading an old Icelandic saga about feuding clans.

• The whole parking permit saga dragged on for the entire summer.

Where does saga come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word comes directly from Old Norse saga, which meant a story, a tale, or a narrative account, and which was originally connected to the verb segja, meaning 'to say' or 'to tell'. In medieval Iceland the term named the great prose narratives that recorded the deeds of kings, settlers, and feuding families, and English adopted it in this scholarly sense in the early 1700s. From those Icelandic histories the meaning broadened to cover any long, episodic story spanning generations, and then loosened further into casual modern use for any long, complicated sequence of events. The Old Norse root is the same family that gave English the everyday verb 'say', so a saga is quite literally a thing that is said or told. Because it travelled into English essentially unchanged, the spelling is short and phonetic, which is exactly why it rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• saga (whole word borrowed from Old Norse, meaning a tale or story; no internal affixes)