Seldom

How to spell seldom

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce seldom

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does seldom mean?

1. adverbNot often; on rare occasions.

Seldom in a sentence

• He seldom checks his personal email during working hours.

• The old printer seldom runs out of ink because nobody uses it.

Where does seldom come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending directly from the Old English adverb seldan or seldum, which meant 'rarely' or 'not often'. It belongs to a wider Germanic family: the same root surfaces in German selten and Dutch zelden, all carrying the sense of something happening infrequently. The underlying notion was of an event that is unusual or strange because it is so rare, and indeed the older word was tied to ideas of the curious and the exceptional. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the -om ending, which is the main pitfall today, since the final syllable is an unstressed schwa that sounds as though it could just as easily be spelled -um. By the late medieval period the modern form seldom was firmly in place as a plain everyday adverb meaning 'rarely'.

How the word is built

• seld- (from Old English seldan: rare, uncommon)
• -om (adverbial ending)