Sweat

How to spell sweat

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sweat

What does sweat mean?

1. verbTo give off moisture through the skin, usually from heat, exertion, or nervousness.
2. nounThe salty moisture released through the skin.

Sweat in a sentence

• verb

  Runners begin to sweat within minutes in this humidity.

• noun

  A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead during the workout.

• verb

  He tends to sweat heavily during job interviews.

• noun

  His shirt was soaked with sweat after the long hike.

Where does sweat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sweat goes back to the Old English noun swat, meaning the salty moisture the body releases through the skin, and its matching verb swaetan, 'to give off such moisture'. Both belong to a wide Germanic family, with relatives such as Dutch zweet and German Schweiss, and ultimately reach back to an ancient Indo-European root that also gave Latin sudor 'sweat' (the source of words like 'exude' and 'sudorific'). The spelling has wandered over the centuries: the early vowel was long, but the modern pronunciation shortened it to rhyme with 'wet', while the writing kept the older 'ea' cluster. That mismatch between the 'ea' on the page and the short /e/ in speech is the main reason the word can trip up a quick writer. By the medieval period the word had also picked up its familiar figurative sense of hard, anxious effort.

How the word is built

• sweat (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)