Tooth

How to spell tooth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tooth

What does tooth mean?

1. nounOne of the hard, bony structures set in the jaw, used for biting and chewing.
2. nounA pointed projection on a tool or part, such as on a saw, comb, or gear.

Tooth in a sentence

• The dentist warned that one cracked tooth would need a crown.

• One tooth on the saw blade had snapped off and left a gap.

• A sharp pain in his lower tooth kept him awake all night.

• A broken tooth on the gear caused the machine to jam.

Where does tooth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Tooth comes straight from the Old English tōþ, the native Anglo-Saxon word for one of the hard structures set in the jaw for biting and chewing. It belongs to a large Germanic family, with close cousins in Dutch tand and German Zahn, and reaches further back to an ancient Proto-Indo-European root meaning roughly 'the biting thing', the same root that surfaces in the Latin dens and the Greek odous, which give us learned words like 'dental' and 'orthodontist'. The plural 'teeth' preserves a very old pattern of changing the inner vowel rather than adding an -s, a habit English shares with foot and feet and goose and geese. The spelling keeps the double 'oo' that the long vowel earned over centuries, which is the part writers occasionally fumble. By extension the word has long named any tooth-like point, such as the projections on a saw blade, a comb, or a gear wheel.

How the word is built

• tooth (single root from Old English tōþ; no prefix or suffix)