Sigh

How to spell sigh

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sigh

What does sigh mean?

1. verbTo release a long, audible breath that expresses tiredness, relief, sadness, or longing.
2. nounA long, audible breath expressing weariness, relief, or emotion.

Sigh in a sentence

• verb

  She would often sigh with relief when the long shift finally ended.

• noun

  She let out a deep sigh when the meeting was finally cancelled.

• verb

  He tends to sigh heavily whenever the printer jams again.

• noun

  A quiet sigh escaped him as he read the rejection letter.

Where does sigh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb sican, meaning 'to draw a long, audible breath', a native Germanic word echoing the very sound it names. In Middle English it appeared in forms such as sihen and sighen, and that spelling is where the troublesome silent -gh crept in. Back in early English the gh once represented a real throaty sound, but over the centuries that sound faded out of speech while the letters stubbornly stayed in the spelling, leaving the modern trap of a word pronounced simply as 'sy'. The same fossilised -gh haunts its relatives 'high', 'nigh', and 'thigh', all of which lost the same guttural noise. So the spelling of sigh is essentially a snapshot of how English sounded several hundred years ago, frozen on the page long after the tongue moved on.

How the word is built

• sigh (single root, from Old English sican: to sigh); the silent -gh preserves an old guttural sound that has long since dropped out of pronunciation