Tin

How to spell tin

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tin

What does tin mean?

1. nounA soft, silvery-white metallic element, often used to coat or plate other metals.
2. nounA sealed metal container holding food or drink, known in British usage as a tin.

Tin in a sentence

• The old roof was sealed with a thin layer of tin.

• She opened a tin of chopped tomatoes for the sauce.

• Tin is alloyed with copper to make bronze.

• The cupboard held a tin of beans and a packet of rice.

Where does tin come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word tin comes straight from Old English 'tin', the native Germanic name for the soft, silvery metal, and it has close cousins across the Germanic family such as Dutch 'tin' and German 'Zinn'. The ultimate source is a prehistoric Germanic root whose earlier meaning is lost, so the trail goes cold before written records begin. Because tin was one of the earliest metals worked by people in Britain, where Cornish tin mines supplied much of ancient Europe, the word has been in continuous everyday use for well over a thousand years. From the metal itself the sense widened: by the nineteenth century a 'tin' came to mean a container made of tin-plated steel, which is why British speakers still call a sealed food can a tin. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple, a plain three letters, because it never passed through Latin or French to pick up extra letters.

How the word is built

• tin (a single Old English root word, not built from prefix or suffix)