Still

How to spell still

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce still

What does still mean?

1. adverbContinuing up to the present time or a stated time; even now.
2. adjectiveNot moving, calm, or silent.
3. verbTo make calm, quiet, or motionless.
4. nounAn apparatus used for distilling spirits such as whisky or brandy.

Still in a sentence

• adverb

  The shops are still open at this late hour.

• adjective

  The lake was perfectly still at dawn.

• verb

  A gentle word can still a crying baby.

• noun

  The whisky makers polished the copper still before the tour.

• adverb

  After ten years she still remembers the address.

• adjective

  She asked the children to keep still during the photograph.

Where does still come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English stille, meaning 'motionless, quiet, or at rest', which goes back to a Germanic root related to the idea of standing fixed in place; it shares deep ancestry with the verb 'to stand' and with Dutch 'stil' and German 'still'. The original force was purely physical: something that did not move or make a sound. Over the medieval period the word grew an adverbial use, first meaning 'always or constantly' and then sliding into the modern sense of 'up to this moment' or 'even now', which is why we say a thing is happening still. The sense of 'nevertheless' grew naturally out of that, since something true even now is something true in spite of change. A separate noun, the distilling 'still', is in fact a clipped form of 'distil', from Latin destillare 'to drip down', and only looks identical to the native word by coincidence, a neat trap given how ordinary the spelling appears.

How the word is built

• still (whole word, from Old English stille meaning motionless or quiet); no separable prefix or suffix