Wilt

How to spell wilt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wilt

What does wilt mean?

1. verbTo droop or become limp through heat, lack of water, or fatigue.
2. nounA plant disease that causes drooping and withering, often caused by fungi or bacteria.

Wilt in a sentence

• verb

  The lettuce will wilt if you leave it out of the fridge.

• noun

  The tomato crop was ruined by a stubborn fungal wilt.

• verb

  Flowers tend to wilt quickly in a hot, dry room.

• noun

  Gardeners watch for early signs of wilt in their cucumber plants.

Where does wilt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wilt comes from an older English verb welk or wilk, meaning to lose freshness or droop, which is related to similar words across the Germanic languages for fading and withering. The modern spelling 'wilt' seems to have arisen in the 1600s, possibly through dialect variation and influence from words like 'welt', and it gradually replaced the older forms. The core idea has always been a plant losing its firmness and bending limply, and from there the word stretched naturally to describe people who flag in heat or exhaustion. A separate, much older 'wilt' also exists as the archaic second-person form of 'will', as in 'thou wilt', but that is a different word with its own history. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the only real spelling care is keeping the single 'l' and the final 't'.

How the word is built

• wilt (from welk/wilk: to lose freshness, droop)