Strength

How to spell strength

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce strength

What does strength mean?

1. nounThe quality of being physically powerful, durable, or capable of great force.

Strength in a sentence

• Years of training gave her the strength to lift the heavy crates alone.

• The bridge was tested for the strength of its steel cables.

Where does strength come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English strengþu, a noun meaning bodily power or firmness, which was formed from the adjective strang, the ancestor of modern 'strong'. The suffix -th, seen in this same pattern in words like 'length' from 'long', 'breadth' from 'broad', and 'depth' from 'deep', turned the adjective into an abstract noun for the quality itself. This noun-forming habit comes straight from the Germanic family of languages, and you can still spot the relatives in German 'Stärke' and Dutch 'sterkte'. The spelling preserves the consonant cluster -ngth, which captures the way 'strong' shifted its vowel and ending when the -th was attached. That dense run of letters, strength with the g sitting silently before the th, is exactly the spot where writers slip and produce 'strenght'.

How the word is built

• streng- (from Old English strang: strong)
• -th (noun-forming suffix indicating a quality or state)