Stout

How to spell stout

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stout

What does stout mean?

1. adjectiveStrong, thick, and durable, or solidly and heavily built.
2. nounA strong, dark beer brewed from roasted malt or barley.

Stout in a sentence

• adjective

  The hikers wore stout leather boots for the rocky trail.

• noun

  The pub serves a creamy Irish stout on tap.

• adjective

  A stout wooden gate kept the cattle in the field.

• noun

  She ordered a pint of stout to go with her steak.

Where does stout come from?

Language of origin: French

Stout came into English in the 1300s from the Old French estout, which meant 'brave, proud, or fierce'. That French form was itself borrowed from a Germanic source related to the Old Dutch and Old High German word stolt, meaning 'proud' or 'stately', a relative of the modern German stolz 'proud'. In its earliest English use it described a valiant or resolute fighter, and from that idea of unyielding strength it broadened to mean physically powerful, robustly built, and thick or sturdy in construction. By the eighteenth century it had also come to mean comfortably plump, a polite way of describing a heavy build, and the dark, full-bodied beer called stout was named because it was a 'stout', meaning strong, version of porter. The short, blunt spelling rarely trips people up, since the -ou- simply tracks the way the word is said.

How the word is built

• stout (from Old French estout 'brave, fierce', of Germanic origin)