Staff

How to spell staff

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce staff

What does staff mean?

1. nounThe group of people employed by an organisation or working under a manager.
2. nounA long stick or pole carried for support, for walking, or as a symbol of authority.
3. verbTo provide an organisation or place with workers.
4. nounThe set of five horizontal lines on which musical notes are written.

Staff in a sentence

• noun

  The hotel hired extra staff for the busy summer season.

• noun

  The old shepherd leaned on a wooden staff as he crossed the field.

• verb

  The agency will staff the new clinic with trained nurses.

• noun

  She wrote the melody carefully onto the blank staff in her notebook.

• noun

  All members of staff must complete the safety training by Friday.

• noun

  The bishop carried an ornate staff during the ceremony.

Where does staff come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Staff is one of the oldest words in English, descending directly from the Old English stæf, which meant a stick, walking pole, or rod. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Dutch staf and the German Stab, all tracing back to a root meaning something firm and upright that you could lean on. The sense of a literal wooden rod came first, and it carried symbolic weight too, since a staff of office marked authority and a shepherd's staff marked a trade. Over time the idea of something that supports you extended figuratively to the people who support an enterprise, giving us the modern 'staff' of employees by the 1700s. The musical sense, the set of horizontal lines on which notes are written, arose because the lines resembled the parallel rods of a frame. The unusual plural 'staves' for the stick meanings preserves an older form, while the people sense simply stays 'staff'.

How the word is built

• staff (a single native root word; no prefix or suffix, from Old English stæf meaning 'stick, rod')