Spill

How to spell spill

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spill

What does spill mean?

1. verbTo cause or allow liquid or loose material to flow or fall out of its container by accident.
2. nounAn instance of liquid escaping its container, or the amount that has escaped.

Spill in a sentence

• verb

  Try not to spill coffee on the new carpet.

• noun

  The oil spill took weeks to clean from the harbour.

• verb

  A full glass is easy to spill when the train jolts.

• noun

  A quick wipe dealt with the small spill on the counter.

Where does spill come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English verb spillan, which meant 'to destroy, kill, or put to death', and by extension 'to waste or squander'. This in turn grew from a Germanic root that carried the idea of splitting or shedding. For centuries the dominant sense was the violent or wasteful one, as in spilling blood, and only gradually did the gentler everyday meaning of letting liquid run out of a container become the common one, a shift well established by the 1500s. The modern noun, meaning an act of spilling or the mess it leaves, is a later development that simply turned the verb into a thing. Because the word is a short, native Germanic survivor with a doubled final consonant, its only real spelling pitfall is remembering the two l's at the end.

How the word is built

• spill (whole word, from Old English spillan: to destroy, waste)