Spite

How to spell spite

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spite

What does spite mean?

1. nounA desire to hurt, annoy, or offend another person out of mean-spirited resentment.
2. verbTo deliberately hurt, annoy, or frustrate someone.

Spite in a sentence

• noun

  He cut down the shared hedge out of pure spite after the argument.

• verb

  He refused the inheritance just to spite his estranged brother.

• noun

  She blocked the driveway from sheer spite, knowing it would inconvenience her neighbour.

• verb

  She would rather spite her rival than accept a sensible compromise.

Where does spite come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Spite arrived in English in the early 1300s as a clipped, everyday form of the longer word 'despite'. That parent came through Old French despit, which in turn descended from the Latin despectus, meaning 'a looking down upon' or 'contempt'; despectus was the past participle of despicere, formed from de- 'down' and specere 'to look', the same root that gives us 'spectacle' and 'inspect'. So at heart spite literally pictures someone looking down on another with scorn, and over time the sense narrowed from general contempt to the petty, deliberate wish to annoy or hurt. The dropped opening syllable is why the spelling looks so bare; the silent history sits in the missing 'de-'. The fixed phrase 'in spite of' still preserves the older flavour of defiance, meaning roughly 'in scornful disregard of'.

How the word is built

• spite (root, a shortened form of 'despite', from Latin despectus 'a looking down on, contempt')