Straight

How to spell straight

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce straight

What does straight mean?

1. adjectiveExtending without a bend, curve, or kink; level and even.
2. adverbDirectly, without delay or detour.

Straight in a sentence

• adjective

  The surveyor confirmed that the new fence ran in a perfectly straight line.

• adverb

  After the long flight he went straight to bed without unpacking.

• adjective

  She used a ruler to draw a straight border around the page.

• adverb

  The road runs straight from the village to the coast.

Where does straight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew out of Middle English streght or straught, which was originally the past participle of the verb strecchen, the ancestor of modern 'stretch'. The underlying idea is concrete and physical: something pulled taut by stretching becomes free of bends, so a 'stretched' line is a 'straight' line. The verb itself comes from Old English streccan, a native Germanic word with relatives across the older Germanic languages. Over time the participle drifted into a full adjective and adverb, and English spelling fossilised the silent 'gh' that once marked a throaty sound long since lost from pronunciation. That ghost 'gh', shared with words like 'light' and 'night', is the spelling trap, since the word now simply sounds like 'strate'. It should not be confused with its homophone 'strait', a narrow channel of water, which comes instead from Latin strictus 'drawn tight'.

How the word is built

• straight (from Middle English streght, past participle of strecchen 'to stretch')

Words that sound like straight

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

• strait: A narrow passage of water connecting two larger bodies of sea.