Spear

How to spell spear

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spear

What does spear mean?

1. nounA weapon with a long shaft and a pointed metal or stone head, used for thrusting or throwing.
2. verbTo pierce or stab something with, or as if with, a pointed object.

Spear in a sentence

• noun

  The museum displayed a bronze spear from an ancient battlefield.

• verb

  She used her fork to spear a single olive from the dish.

• noun

  The fisherman carved a wooden spear to catch eels in the shallows.

• verb

  The diver tried to spear the fish as it swam past the reef.

Where does spear come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Spear comes straight from the Old English word spere, which named a long shaft tipped with a sharp point and used for thrusting or throwing. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse spjor, Old High German sper, and modern German Speer, all pointing back to a common ancestor that meant a pointed wooden shaft. Some scholars connect this root to a sense of splitting or cutting, fitting a weapon made by sharpening a length of wood. The spelling settled into its modern shape during the long shift in English vowels, when the older spere came to be written with the 'ea' that signals its long vowel sound, the same pattern seen in 'ear' and 'fear'. The verb sense, meaning to pierce or stab as if with a spear, grew naturally out of the noun and was well established by the medieval period. Because it is a homely, ancient word, its spelling is regular and rarely causes trouble.

How the word is built

• spear (a single native root from Old English spere meaning a thrusting weapon); no prefix or suffix