Wildfire

How to spell wildfire

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wildfire

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wildfire mean?

1. nounA large, destructive fire that spreads quickly across countryside, forest, or open land.
2. nounSomething, such as news, rumour, or a trend, that spreads very rapidly and uncontrollably.

Wildfire in a sentence

• The summer drought left the hills primed for a wildfire.

• The rumour about the merger spread through the office like wildfire.

• Firefighters worked through the night to contain the wildfire.

• The new app caught on like wildfire among students.

Where does wildfire come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, built from two of the oldest words in the language. 'Wild' descends from the Old English 'wilde', meaning untamed or uncultivated, a word shared across the Germanic family and related to the German 'wild'. 'Fire' comes from the Old English 'fyr', the everyday word for burning flame, again with cousins throughout Germanic languages. The two were joined by the medieval period, originally describing not only uncontrolled flames in the countryside but also a kind of highly flammable composition used in warfare, the famous 'Greek fire' that was almost impossible to extinguish. From that sense of something that races and cannot be stopped came the familiar figurative use, as in news or rumour that spreads 'like wildfire'. Because both halves are common, plain words, the spelling holds few traps; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single, unbroken word.

How the word is built

• wild (uncontrolled, untamed)
• fire (burning)