Vault

How to spell vault

5 letters · 1 syllable

5 of the 97 people asked to spell vault in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce vault

What does vault mean?

1. nounA secure, reinforced room used to store money, valuables, or important documents.
2. nounAn arched ceiling or roof, typically built of stone or brick.
3. verbTo leap or jump over an obstacle, often using the hands or a pole for support.

Vault in a sentence

• noun

  The bank kept the gold bars locked in a steel vault.

• noun

  The cathedral's stone vault soared high above the worshippers.

• verb

  The athlete can vault over the high bar with ease.

• noun

  Only two managers knew the code to open the vault.

• noun

  Restorers spent years repairing the cracked medieval vault.

• verb

  He watched the gymnast vault across the wooden horse.

Where does vault come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Vault arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French 'voute' (later 'volte'), which came from the Vulgar Latin 'volta', a form derived from the Latin verb 'volvere', meaning 'to roll' or 'to turn'. The architectural sense came first: an arched ceiling 'turns' or curves over a space, so the curved stone roof was literally the 'turned' structure. From that arched-room sense English developed the idea of a secure underground chamber, since strongrooms and burial chambers were often built with such arches, giving us the bank 'vault'. The verb 'to vault', meaning to leap over something, came through the related Italian 'voltare' and French 'volter', again from 'volvere', because a vaulting jump 'turns' the body over an obstacle. The silent 'l', inserted into the spelling under Latin influence, is the modern trap, since the word sounds like 'vawt' but keeps its rolled-in 'l'.

How the word is built

• vault (from Latin volvere: to roll, turn, an arched form)