Steel

How to spell steel

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce steel

What does steel mean?

1. nounA hard, strong alloy of iron and carbon used in construction and tools.
2. verbTo mentally prepare or harden oneself to face something difficult.

Steel in a sentence

• noun

  The new bridge rests on reinforced steel beams.

• verb

  He had to steel himself before reading the test results.

• noun

  The chef preferred a knife with a polished steel blade.

• verb

  She paused to steel her nerves ahead of the interview.

Where does steel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Steel comes from the Old English stēli or style, a word for the hardened, carbon-bearing form of iron, and it traces back to a Germanic root meaning something like 'standing firm' or 'firmly fixed'. The underlying idea was hardness and resistance, the very qualities that distinguish steel from softer iron. Related forms appear across the Germanic languages, such as the Dutch staal and German Stahl, all sharing that sense of a tough, rigid material. From the literal metal, English developed the figurative verb 'to steel oneself', meaning to harden one's resolve, recorded from the late medieval period onward. The spelling trap is purely that it sounds identical to 'steal', the verb of theft, which descends from a completely separate Old English word, stelan; remembering that the metal keeps the double 'ee' helps keep the two apart.

How the word is built

• steel (Old English stēli: hard metal), a single native root with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like steel

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

• steal: To take someone else's property dishonestly and without permission.