Wilderness

How to spell wilderness

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wilderness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wilderness mean?

1. nounA large area of wild, uncultivated land that has been left in its natural state.

Wilderness in a sentence

• The hikers spent a week in the wilderness with no phone signal.

• Vast tracts of northern wilderness remain untouched by roads.

Where does wilderness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wilderness comes from Old English, where the underlying form was something like 'wildēornes', literally a place of wild beasts. It was built from 'wilde' (wild, untamed) joined to 'dēor', the Old English word for animal or beast, which survives today in the much narrower modern word 'deer'. Adding the suffix '-ness', which turns a description into a noun for a state or region, produced the sense of 'land where wild animals roam'. By the time it settled into Middle English as 'wildernesse', the meaning had broadened to any uncultivated, uninhabited tract of country rather than just an animal haunt. The hidden 'deer' inside the spelling is a useful memory hook: the middle is 'wild-er-ness', and the unstressed '-er-' schwa is the part writers most often fumble.

How the word is built

• wild
• dēor (Old English: wild animal)
• -ness (noun-forming suffix denoting a state or place)