Siege

How to spell siege

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce siege

What does siege mean?

1. nounA military operation in which forces surround a town or fortress to cut off supplies and force a surrender.

Siege in a sentence

• The castle endured a long siege before its defenders surrendered.

• Historians studied how the ancient city survived the siege for two years.

Where does siege come from?

Language of origin: French

Siege came into English in the 1200s from the Old French word sege, which simply meant a seat or a place where one sits. That French noun grew out of the Latin verb sedere, meaning 'to sit', the same root that gives us 'sediment', 'session' and 'reside'. The military sense developed quite naturally: to lay siege to a town was to sit one's army down in front of it and stay put until the defenders gave in. The earliest English uses could still mean a throne or seat of honour before the warfare meaning took over. The spelling preserves the French -ie- vowel pairing, which is the trap, because writers expect the more common -ei- and the word does not follow the familiar 'i before e' jingle in any helpful way.

How the word is built

• siege (from Old French sege, a seat or sitting), single root, no affixes