Waist

How to spell waist

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce waist

What does waist mean?

1. nounThe narrow part of the human body between the ribs and the hips, or the corresponding part of a garment.

Waist in a sentence

• The tailor measured his waist before altering the trousers.

• She tied the apron strings around her waist.

Where does waist come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Waist comes from Middle English wast, which most scholars trace back to an unrecorded Old English word related to weaxan, meaning 'to grow'. The underlying idea is the part of the body where a person's growth or build is measured, the place the figure narrows between the ribs and the hips. Over time the spelling settled with the -ai- vowel, distinguishing it on the page from its sound-alike 'waste', which has an entirely separate Latin-derived origin. By the late medieval period waist also came to mean the narrow middle section of a garment, and later the narrowing middle of a ship. The shared pronunciation with 'waste' is the whole spelling trap here: 'waist' is the body, and it keeps the 'ai' that you can link to the idea of the body's natural shape.

How the word is built

• waist (single root, from Old English wæst: growth, build of the body)

Words that sound like waist

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• waste: To use something carelessly or to no useful purpose, so that its value is lost.