White

How to spell white

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce white

What does white mean?

1. adjectiveOf the colour of fresh snow or milk, the lightest possible shade.
2. nounThe colour white, or the pale part of something such as an egg or the eye.

White in a sentence

• adjective

  The bride chose a long white dress for the ceremony.

• noun

  Separate the yolk from the white before whisking.

• adjective

  He painted the kitchen walls a clean white before the guests arrived.

• noun

  The doctor checked the white of his eye for any redness.

Where does white come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

White descends from the Old English hwit, which meant bright, radiant, or shining as much as it meant the colour we now picture. That word grew from a Proto-Germanic form hwitaz, the same root that gave Dutch wit, German weiss, and Old Norse hvitr, so it has close cousins right across the Germanic languages. Further back, scholars link it to an Indo-European root meaning to shine or to be bright, which is why the earliest sense leaned on brilliance rather than a specific shade. The spelling once began with hw-, mirroring the way the word was pronounced with a breathy puff before the vowel; over the medieval period the letters were swapped to wh-, matching words like what and when, even though most modern speakers no longer sound that initial h. That silent, reordered wh- is the only real trap in the spelling, since the word otherwise reads exactly as it sounds.

How the word is built

• white (single root from Old English hwit, meaning bright or shining)