Underground

How to spell underground

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce underground

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does underground mean?

1. adjectiveSituated, placed, or occurring below the surface of the earth.
2. adjectiveOperating in secret, hidden, or outside official or mainstream channels.

Underground in a sentence

• The building has an underground car park beneath the lobby.

• The journalist spent years exposing an underground trade in stolen art.

• Engineers laid the new cables in an underground duct along the street.

• During the occupation, an underground newspaper circulated in secret.

Where does underground come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent native English compound, joining the Old English preposition 'under', meaning 'beneath' or 'below', with 'ground', from Old English 'grund', which meant the bottom, the foundation, or the surface of the earth. Both halves are solidly Germanic and have been part of English since before written records, so the word carries no hidden foreign spelling. It first appeared as a straightforward adjective and adverb meaning 'below the surface of the earth' and only later took on figurative life. From the late eighteenth century it described secret or clandestine activity that operates out of sight, and in the nineteenth century London gave it a famous concrete sense: the city's underground railway, opened in 1863, made 'the Underground' a household name. The spelling almost never trips adults up, since each part is a common standalone word.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath)
• ground (the earth's surface)