Scratch

How to spell scratch

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scratch

What does scratch mean?

1. verbTo rub or scrape a surface with something sharp, often the nails, leaving a mark or relieving an itch.
2. nounA thin mark, cut, or graze made on a surface or skin by something sharp.

Scratch in a sentence

• verb

  Try not to scratch the insect bite on your arm.

• noun

  There was a faint scratch across the screen of the new phone.

• verb

  The cat will scratch the side of the sofa if you let it.

• noun

  The fall left a small scratch on her knee.

Where does scratch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Scratch first appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, and seems to have been born from a collision of two earlier verbs that meant much the same thing: 'scrat', meaning to scrape or claw, and 'cratch', meaning to scratch or grate. Both of these grew out of the same broad Germanic family of words for scraping and clawing, related to forms found in Dutch 'kratsen' and German 'kratzen', both meaning 'to scratch'. The blending of 'scrat' and 'cratch' produced the single tidy form we now spell with that distinctive 'scr-' opening and the hard '-tch' ending. Over the centuries the meaning fanned out from the literal raking of a surface to many figurative uses, including a small wound, a starting line scraped in the ground, and the phrase 'from scratch', which originally referred to beginning a race with no head start from that scratched line. The unusual '-tch' spelling, rather than a plain '-ch', follows the common English pattern after a short vowel, as in 'catch', 'match' and 'patch'.

How the word is built

• scratch (a single root word; likely a blend of Middle English 'scrat' and 'cratch', both meaning to scrape)