Trough

How to spell trough

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trough

What does trough mean?

1. nounA long, narrow open container that holds food or water for animals.
2. nounThe lowest point in a cycle, curve, or measurement, between two higher points.

Trough in a sentence

• The farmer filled the trough with fresh water for the cattle.

• Sales hit a trough in January before recovering in spring.

• Each morning he tipped grain into the long wooden trough in the stable.

• The chart showed a deep trough between the two peaks of demand.

Where does trough come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Trough comes straight from Old English trog, the word for a hollow wooden vessel or basin, and it has cousins all across the Germanic languages, including German Trog and Old Norse trog. The deep root is the Proto-Germanic word trugaz, which is itself tied to the ancient root for 'tree' or 'wood', because the earliest troughs were simply lengths of timber hollowed out to hold water or feed. So at heart a trough is a 'wooden thing', a relative of the very word 'tree'. The modern spelling with -ough is a fossil: it once represented a guttural sound, now lost, that leaves the silent reminder of an older English pronunciation. That is exactly the spelling trap, since the word is said 'troff' but written with the same -ough cluster that elsewhere sounds like 'though', 'through' or 'thorough'. The figurative sense, a low point between two peaks, grew naturally from the shape of the dipped vessel and became common in describing graphs, weather and economic cycles.

How the word is built

• Single morpheme from Old English trog (a hollowed vessel); no prefix or suffix, the tricky -ough spelling preserves an older pronunciation