Sway

How to spell sway

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sway

What does sway mean?

1. verbTo move slowly back and forth, or to influence someone's opinion or decision.
2. nounControlling power or influence, or a swinging side-to-side movement.

Sway in a sentence

• verb

  The tall trees began to sway in the rising wind.

• noun

  The union once held considerable sway over the factory.

• verb

  A strong closing argument can sway the jury.

• noun

  The gentle sway of the boat made the passengers drowsy.

Where does sway come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Sway comes from a family of northern Germanic words for swinging or bending motion. The most likely ancestor is the Old Norse verb sveigja, meaning to bend or to make something swing, reinforced in English by the Middle Low German and Dutch verb swaaien, meaning to swing or to wave about. It surfaced in Middle English as sweyen during the 1300s, first describing the physical motion of moving from side to side, as a tall mast or a branch does in the wind. From that bodily picture the word grew a figurative life: to sway someone became to bend their opinion, and holding sway came to mean wielding controlling power over people or events. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the -ay ending behaving just as it does in day and play, which is why sway rarely trips up an adult speller.

How the word is built

• sway (single Germanic root meaning to swing or bend); no prefix or suffix