Thirst

How to spell thirst

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thirst

What does thirst mean?

1. nounThe bodily need or strong desire to drink something.
2. verbTo feel a need to drink, or to crave something intensely.

Thirst in a sentence

• noun

  After the long hike, a cold glass of water quenched her thirst.

• verb

  Many new managers thirst for recognition from their superiors.

• noun

  The spicy meal left him with a thirst that lasted all evening.

• verb

  The parched travellers began to thirst as the supplies ran low.

Where does thirst come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Thirst descends from the Old English noun thurst, meaning the dry, urgent need to drink, and it traces back to a shared Germanic root that also produced the Dutch dorst and the German Durst. The deeper ancestry reaches a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'to be dry' or 'to parch', the same root that lies behind the Latin torrere 'to scorch' and ultimately the English word 'toast'. Over the centuries the spelling shifted: the older form thurst, with the vowel before the r, was reshaped into the modern thirst as English pronunciation settled. By the medieval period the word had also taken on a figurative life, describing a powerful craving for anything, such as a thirst for knowledge or power. The spelling trap is simply that the unstressed vowel sound here is written with i rather than u, even though the throaty r blurs the vowel almost completely.

How the word is built

• thirst (whole native root; from Old English thurst, with no separable affixes)