Screw

How to spell screw

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce screw

What does screw mean?

1. nounA metal fastener with a spiral ridge that is turned to drive it into wood, metal, or another material.
2. verbTo attach, tighten, or twist something by turning it like a threaded fastener.

Screw in a sentence

• noun

  The loose hinge needed one more screw to hold firm.

• verb

  You need to screw the bracket firmly to the wall before hanging the shelf.

• noun

  He dropped a tiny screw behind the workbench and spent ten minutes finding it.

• verb

  Remember to screw the lid back on the jar so the contents stay fresh.

Where does screw come from?

Language of origin: French

Screw entered English in the 1400s from the Old French escroue, which named the nut or female thread into which a bolt turns. The trail goes back to the Latin scrofa, meaning a breeding sow, and the link is wonderfully earthy: the spiral thread was thought to resemble a pig's curly tail (some sources point instead to the boar's corkscrew-shaped genitals). From that image the word came to mean the helical fastener itself, and by extension the act of turning one into place. Over the centuries it spread into countless figurative uses, from screwing up courage to screwing up a task, but the spelling has stayed steady. The trap for writers is purely phonetic: the opening 'scr' cluster and the 'ew' spelling of the long /uː/ sound, since the same sound is written 'oo', 'ue', or 'ou' in other words.

How the word is built

• screw (single root from Old French escroue: a nut, the female part of a thread); no prefix or suffix