Straighten

How to spell straighten

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce straighten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does straighten mean?

1. verbTo make something straight, level, or neatly arranged.

Straighten in a sentence

• He paused to straighten the picture frames hanging crookedly along the hallway.

• The dentist fitted a brace to straighten her crowded front teeth.

Where does straighten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the adjective 'straight', which began life as 'streht', the past participle of the Old English verb 'streccan', meaning 'to stretch'. The original idea was of something pulled taut and therefore made direct, with no bends in it, which is exactly the sense we still use today. The silent 'gh' in the middle is a fossil of an old guttural sound, once pronounced something like the 'ch' in Scottish 'loch', that English speakers stopped voicing centuries ago while stubbornly keeping it in the spelling. The verb 'straighten' was formed later, around the sixteenth century, by adding the productive suffix '-en', which turns adjectives into verbs meaning 'to make so' (compare 'harden', 'widen' and 'soften'). Note that it has a near-identical sounding cousin, 'straiten' (to make narrow or to restrict), which comes from 'strait' and is the real spelling trap: the everyday word about making things straight always keeps that silent 'gh'.

How the word is built

• straight (not bent, from Old English streht)
• -en (verb-forming suffix meaning 'to make')