Salt

How to spell salt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce salt

What does salt mean?

1. nounA white crystalline substance, mainly sodium chloride, used to season and preserve food.
2. verbTo season or preserve something with salt.

Salt in a sentence

• noun

  The recipe calls for a pinch of salt and some pepper.

• verb

  Remember to salt the pasta water before it boils.

• noun

  Too much salt in the diet can raise blood pressure.

• verb

  Fishermen would salt the catch to keep it from spoiling.

Where does salt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Salt comes straight from the Old English word sealt, the everyday Anglo-Saxon name for the white crystalline mineral used to season and preserve food. It belongs to a large family of related words across the Germanic languages, such as Dutch zout and German Salz, and it traces back through an ancient Indo-European root that also gave Latin sal and Greek hals, both meaning 'salt'. That same Latin sal lies hidden inside surprising relatives in English, including 'salary' (Roman soldiers were once associated with payments connected to salt) and 'salad' (originally salted greens). The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, with the only mild trap being the silent-feeling 'l' before the 't', since many speakers pronounce it with a slightly swallowed 'l'. Because the word is so old and so common, it never picked up the complications of later French or Latin borrowings.

How the word is built

• salt (Old English sealt, a sodium compound used to season food); a single root with no affixes