Shower

How to spell shower

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shower

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shower mean?

1. nounA fixture or enclosure that sprays water down for washing the body, or the act of washing under it.
2. nounA short, often light fall of rain, snow, or similar.
3. verbTo wash under a spray of water, or to give or send something in great abundance.

Shower in a sentence

• noun

  The hot shower in the hotel room had excellent water pressure.

• noun

  A brief shower passed over the city before the sun returned.

• verb

  The fans like to shower the winning team with praise after every match.

• noun

  He took a quick shower before heading to the office.

• noun

  The forecast warned of a light shower in the afternoon.

• verb

  She chose to shower rather than soak in the bath that morning.

Where does shower come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English scur, which meant a brief fall of rain, hail, or even a flurry of arrows or blows in battle. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, sharing roots with the Old Norse skur and the German Schauer, all pointing back to a sense of a sudden burst falling from above. For most of its life the word referred only to weather, and only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did it come to name the plumbing fixture that sprays water down on a bather, a natural extension of the falling-water image. The figurative sense, to shower someone with gifts or praise, simply pours abundance down on a person the way rain pours from the sky. A useful spelling memory is that the modern word still hides the older 'show' at its front, even though the two words are unrelated in meaning.

How the word is built

• show- (Old English scur: a fall of rain)
• -er (variant ending; not the agent suffix here)