Thyme

How to spell thyme

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thyme

What does thyme mean?

1. nounA small aromatic herb with tiny leaves, used to flavour cooking.

Thyme in a sentence

• The recipe calls for a sprig of fresh thyme and a bay leaf.

• She grows rosemary, sage, and thyme in pots by the kitchen door.

Where does thyme come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Thyme comes from the Greek word thymon, the name of the fragrant herb, which is thought to derive from thyein, meaning 'to burn as a sacrifice' or 'to make a smoke offering', since the dried plant was burned as incense in temples. From Greek the word passed into Latin as thymum and then into Old French as thym, where it was borrowed into Middle English in the 1300s. The original spelling in English was closer to 'tyme', but scholars later restored the silent 'h' to reflect the Greek and Latin forms, and that learned respelling is exactly why the word now looks nothing like the way it sounds. Because thyme is pronounced identically to 'time', the unexpected 'th' and the silent 'e' are the whole spelling trap. The same herb gave its name to the medical term 'thymol', an antiseptic compound first isolated from it.

How the word is built

• thyme (single root from Greek thymon, the aromatic herb)

Words that sound like thyme

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• time: The ongoing sequence of events and the measured duration in which they occur.