Son

How to spell son

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce son

What does son mean?

1. nounA person's male child.

Son in a sentence

• Her eldest son inherited the family business.

• They named their newborn son after his grandfather.

Where does son come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word son descends from the Old English sunu, which simply meant a male child, and it traces back through the older Germanic word sunuz to a shared ancestral root that many scholars connect to a sense of 'giving birth' or 'bringing forth'. It belongs to a tight family of close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the German Sohn, the Dutch zoon and the Old Norse sonr, which is why it has stayed so short and stable through the centuries. The spelling looks irregular because the vowel is pronounced like the 'u' in 'cut' yet is written with an 'o'; this happened because medieval scribes often swapped 'u' for 'o' next to letters like m, n and v to keep the strokes legible in cramped handwriting. The very same scribal habit gave us the spellings of 'come', 'some' and 'won'. The most useful thing to remember is that son shares its sound exactly with the daytime star 'sun', so the two are perpetual homophones that have to be told apart by meaning alone.

How the word is built

• son (a complete word from Old English sunu, meaning a male child; no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like son

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sun: The star at the centre of the solar system, or the light and warmth it gives.