Strange

How to spell strange

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce strange

What does strange mean?

1. adjectiveUnusual, unfamiliar, or surprising in a way that is hard to explain.

Strange in a sentence

• A strange noise kept coming from the engine on the drive home.

• She noticed a strange smell in the kitchen and checked the bin.

Where does strange come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from the Old French estrange, meaning 'foreign' or 'belonging to another place', which descended from the Latin extraneus, literally 'external' or 'coming from outside'. That Latin form was built on extra, meaning 'outside' or 'beyond', so the earliest force of the word was 'not from here'. English took it up around the year 1300, at first to describe people, lands, and customs that were foreign, and only later did the meaning soften into the modern sense of 'unfamiliar, odd, or surprising'. The same extraneus root still surfaces in the English word 'extraneous', meaning irrelevant or external, which is a useful clue to the shared origin. The slightly unexpected spelling, with the /eɪndʒ/ sound written as -ange, is a direct inheritance from the French form and explains why the ending looks the way it does.

How the word is built

• strang- (foreign, external, from Latin extraneus)
• -e