Volunteer

How to spell volunteer

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce volunteer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does volunteer mean?

1. nounA person who freely offers to take part in an activity or task, usually without payment.
2. verbTo freely offer to do something or to give information without being asked.

Volunteer in a sentence

• noun

  The charity relies on every volunteer who gives up a weekend.

• verb

  She decided to volunteer at the local food bank every Saturday.

• noun

  Each volunteer received a badge and a list of duties at the festival.

• verb

  Nobody wanted to volunteer for the late shift over the holidays.

Where does volunteer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin voluntas, meaning 'will' or 'free choice', which was built on velle, the verb 'to wish' or 'to want'. From this came the Latin voluntarius, 'of one's own free will', and English first absorbed the idea through the French volontaire. In the early 1600s English speakers used 'voluntary' as a noun for someone who offered military service of their own accord, and the spelling soon shifted to 'volunteer' under the influence of the French ending and the familiar English -eer suffix seen in words like 'engineer' and 'mountaineer'. The verb sense, meaning to offer oneself freely, followed later in the same century. The central spelling trap is the single 'l' and the doubled 'e' in the -eer ending, both echoing the word's roots in free will and the action of a willing doer.

How the word is built

• volunt- (from Latin voluntas: will, free choice)
• -eer (one who is concerned with or does something)