Tongue

How to spell tongue

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tongue

What does tongue mean?

1. nounThe muscular organ in the mouth used for tasting, swallowing, and forming speech.
2. nounA particular language or manner of speaking, especially a nation's native one.

Tongue in a sentence

• The dentist asked her to lift her tongue during the examination.

• She returned to her mother tongue after years of living abroad.

• The hot soup burned his tongue at dinner.

• The ancient text was written in a forgotten tongue.

Where does tongue come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English tunge, the ordinary Anglo-Saxon name for the fleshy organ in the mouth, and the same word was already used to mean a language or way of speaking. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins such as the German Zunge and Dutch tong, all going back to a shared root meaning the tongue. The same ancient root also lies behind the Latin lingua, which is why English words like 'language' and 'linguistic' feel related even though they arrived by a different path. In early English the spelling was straightforward, something like 'tunge' or 'tonge', but scribal fashion in the late medieval period added a decorative silent -ue at the end, much as in 'plague' and 'vague'. That French-influenced flourish is exactly the trap today: the word is said as a plain 'tung', yet it is written with an o and a silent gue, neither of which the ear predicts.

How the word is built

• tongue (single root from Old English tunge; modern spelling adds a silent -ue after the g)