Sunshine

How to spell sunshine

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sunshine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sunshine mean?

1. nounThe light and warmth that comes directly from the sun.

Sunshine in a sentence

• The cafe terrace gets plenty of sunshine in the afternoon.

• After a week of rain, the sunshine finally returned.

Where does sunshine come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English compound, built from two old Germanic words: 'sun', from Old English 'sunne', and 'shine', from Old English 'scinan', meaning 'to give off light'. Both halves trace back to Proto-Germanic roots and ultimately to Indo-European ancestors, with the 'sun' element related to similar words across the Germanic languages. The compound itself appears in English from around the 1200s, simply joining the two familiar ideas of the sun and its shining light. Because each part is so common and the spelling of both is regular, the joined word holds no real surprises; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not two. It has stayed remarkably stable in form for many centuries.

How the word is built

• sun (the star)
• shine (to give off light)