Sewer

How to spell sewer

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sewer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sewer mean?

1. nounAn underground pipe or channel that carries away waste water and sewage.

Sewer in a sentence

• Heavy rain caused the sewer to overflow into the street.

• The council spent millions replacing the ageing sewer beneath the city.

Where does sewer come from?

Language of origin: French

The drainage sense of sewer arrived in English in the 1400s from Anglo-Norman French sever or sewere, which came from an Old French verb essever meaning 'to drain off' or 'carry water away'. That in turn traces back to a reconstructed Latin form exaquare, built from ex- 'out' and aqua 'water', so the literal idea was 'to take the water out'. Originally a sewer was simply a channel that drained surface water from land, and only later did it come to mean the underground pipe that carries away waste. The completely separate 'one who sews' sense is native Germanic, from the Old English verb seowian 'to stitch', and the two words ended up spelled identically by coincidence rather than shared origin. Because the same five letters can be read as either 'SOO-er' (the drain) or 'SOH-er' (the stitcher), sewer is a classic heteronym, and the silent shift of the vowel is the only thing telling the reader which is meant.

How the word is built

• sew- (from Old French essever: to drain off water)
• -er (agent/instrument noun)