Strangest

How to spell strangest

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce strangest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does strangest mean?

1. adjectiveMost unusual, odd, or unfamiliar of a group.

Strangest in a sentence

• That was the strangest phone call she had ever received at work.

• Of all the houses on the street, theirs had the strangest layout.

Where does strangest come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the superlative of 'strange', which English took from the Old French 'estrange', meaning 'foreign' or 'unfamiliar'. The French word descended in turn from the Latin 'extraneus', literally 'that which is on the outside', built on 'extra' meaning 'outside'. The same Latin root gave us 'extraneous' and even, by a different path, 'extra' itself, so a strange thing was originally simply something from beyond one's own world. English adopted 'strange' in the 1200s, first in the sense of 'foreign' before it drifted toward the modern meaning of odd or unusual. The superlative '-est' ending, a native English suffix, attaches cleanly without altering the spelling apart from dropping the silent final 'e', which is the small detail writers occasionally trip over.

How the word is built

• strange (foreign, unusual; from Latin extraneus 'external, foreign')
• -est (superlative suffix)