Wheat

How to spell wheat

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wheat

What does wheat mean?

1. nounA cereal grain grown widely for its seed, which is milled into flour for bread, pasta and many other foods.

Wheat in a sentence

• The farmer planted a large field of wheat in the autumn.

• This bread is made from stoneground wheat flour.

Where does wheat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wheat is a thoroughly native English word, descending from Old English hwǣte, the name for the cereal grass cultivated since prehistoric times. It belongs to the same broad Germanic family as Dutch weit and German Weizen, all tracing back to a Proto-Germanic form hwaitjaz. The most charming detail is its root: hwaitjaz is linked to the word that gave us 'white', because the flour milled from the grain was prized for its pale colour, so 'wheat' literally meant something like 'the white grain'. The spelling preserves the old 'wh' cluster that once carried a breathy h sound, the same cluster seen in 'white', 'wheel' and 'whisk', even though most modern speakers no longer pronounce that h. The 'ea' spelling for the long 'ee' vowel is the lingering print of older pronunciations, and it is the main place the word can trip a writer who expects 'whe' to look different.

How the word is built

• single native root: Old English hwǣte (the cereal grain), related to hwīt 'white' from the pale colour of the flour