Thrash

How to spell thrash

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thrash

What does thrash mean?

1. verbTo beat someone or something severely, or to defeat an opponent decisively.
2. verbTo move violently or flail the limbs about, often in panic or struggle.

Thrash in a sentence

• The home team went on to thrash their rivals by four goals.

• The netted fish began to thrash on the deck of the boat.

• He warned that he would thrash the carpet to knock out the dust.

• A frightened swimmer may thrash in the water and tire quickly.

Where does thrash come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Thrash is a variant of the older verb thresh, which comes from the Old English therscan, meaning literally to beat or stamp, the action of separating grain from straw by striking it. The same Germanic root produced related words in Dutch (dorsen) and German (dreschen), all tied to the agricultural work of beating cut crops on a threshing floor. Over the centuries the form split: thresh kept the narrow farming sense of separating grain, while thrash drifted toward the general idea of beating, whipping, or moving violently. By the 1500s and 1600s thrash had taken on the figurative sense of defeating someone soundly, and later the sense of flailing about wildly, as a fish does on land. Because thrash and thresh began as the same word, they remain easy to mix up, and the modern split in spelling and meaning is the main trap to remember.

How the word is built

• thrash (variant of thresh, from Old English therscan: to thresh, beat)