Sofa

How to spell sofa

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sofa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sofa mean?

1. nounA long, upholstered seat with a back and arms, made to seat more than one person.

Sofa in a sentence

• We curled up on the sofa to watch a film.

• The new sofa barely fit through the front door.

Where does sofa come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word sofa traces back to the Arabic suffah, which described a long stone or raised bench, often built against a wall and covered with cushions and carpets for reclining. The term travelled into Turkish as sofa with the sense of a raised, carpeted seating platform, and from there it spread into European languages. English picked it up in the seventeenth century, most likely by way of French sofa, where it first named a grand, cushioned divan in the Eastern style before settling into its modern meaning of an ordinary upholstered seat for two or more people. Because the word was borrowed whole and never anglicised, its spelling stays simple and phonetic, which is why it gives writers little trouble. It sits alongside other comfortable-furniture borrowings such as divan and ottoman, all of which entered English from the same broad cultural world of the Ottoman and Arab East.

How the word is built

• sofa (a single unanalysable root, borrowed whole from Arabic suffah)