Step

How to spell step

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce step

What does step mean?

1. verbTo move by lifting and setting down a foot, or to move a short distance.
2. nounA single movement of the foot in walking, a stair, or one stage in a process.

Step in a sentence

• verb

  Please step back from the platform edge.

• noun

  The final step of the recipe is to chill the mixture overnight.

• verb

  She had to step carefully over the wet floor.

• noun

  He tripped on the bottom step of the staircase.

Where does step come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Old English, where the noun stæpe meant a single movement of the foot and the verb stæppan meant to tread or to advance on foot. It belongs to a broader West Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Saxon and Old High German that all carried the same sense of placing the foot down firmly while walking. The original idea was very physical, a literal pace or footfall, and over centuries it broadened to cover stairs, measured progress, and the abstract notion of one action in a sequence, as in following the steps of a recipe. Because it is a short native word that follows ordinary English spelling, it kept its simple form rather than picking up the silent letters that Latin and French borrowings often carry. Its one real trap is the rarely needed homophone steppe, the vast treeless grassland, which arrived much later from Russian.

How the word is built

• step (from Old English stæpe/stæppan: a footfall, to move the foot)