Water

How to spell water

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce water

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does water mean?

1. nounThe clear, colourless liquid that forms rain, rivers, lakes, and seas and is essential to life.
2. verbTo pour or sprinkle liquid onto plants or soil to keep them alive.

Water in a sentence

• noun

  The hikers ran out of water halfway up the trail.

• verb

  Please remember to water the tomatoes every evening.

• noun

  A burst pipe left water pooling across the kitchen floor.

• verb

  He asked a neighbour to water the garden while he was away.

Where does water come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Water descends directly from the Old English wæter, the everyday word for the clear liquid that fills rivers, seas, and rain. It belongs to a large family of related Germanic words, including the Dutch water and the German Wasser, all tracing back to a reconstructed prehistoric root meaning simply the substance we drink and bathe in. The same ancient root also surfaces in distant cousins such as the Greek hudor, which gives English its hydro words like hydrogen and hydrant, and the Latin unda, meaning a wave. Because the word is so old and native, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable, though the pronunciation drifted so the second vowel became an unstressed schwa, which is why some writers briefly hesitate over the ending. As one of the most common nouns in the language, it has also spun off countless compounds such as waterfall, waterproof, and watershed.

How the word is built

• water (whole word, from Old English wæter); no separable affixes