Swallow

How to spell swallow

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce swallow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does swallow mean?

1. verbTo make food, drink, or saliva pass down the throat from the mouth.
2. nounA small, fast-flying migratory bird with a forked tail and pointed wings.

Swallow in a sentence

• verb

  Take a sip of water to help you swallow the large tablet.

• noun

  A swallow darted low over the pond catching insects at dusk.

• verb

  The sore throat made it painful to swallow even soft food.

• noun

  Each spring a swallow returns to nest under the eaves of the old barn.

Where does swallow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is really two old words that ended up spelled the same. The verb comes from the Old English swelgan, meaning to take into the throat and let it pass down, a thoroughly native Germanic word with relatives in Dutch zwelgen and German schwelgen. The bird, by contrast, descends from a completely unrelated Old English word, swealwe, the name for the small fork-tailed migrant; cousins survive in German Schwalbe and the Scandinavian languages. Over the centuries both forms drifted toward the same modern shape, which is why a single spelling now covers an action and a creature. The verb later picked up the figurative sense of accepting something doubtful, as in swallowing a story, while the bird gave English the proverb about one swallow not making a summer. The doubled l and the unstressed second syllable, written -ow but sounded like a soft schwa, are the small traps that occasionally trip writers up.

How the word is built

• swallow (single root from Old English swelgan, to ingest); the bird sense is a separate Old English word swealwe