Wine

How to spell wine

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wine

What does wine mean?

1. nounAn alcoholic drink made from fermented grapes or other fruit.
2. verbTo entertain someone with food and drink, typically to impress or win their favour.

Wine in a sentence

• noun

  The waiter recommended a dry red wine to go with the lamb.

• verb

  The firm likes to wine and dine prospective clients before signing a deal.

• noun

  She stored each bottle of wine on its side in the cellar rack.

• verb

  Managers often wine and dine visiting investors at the best venues in town.

Where does wine come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is one of the oldest borrowings in the language, taken into Old English as 'win' from the Latin 'vinum', which simply meant 'wine'. The Latin word is thought to come from a shared Mediterranean source also behind the Greek 'oinos', reflecting how the cultivation of the grape and its trade spread across the ancient world. Germanic peoples picked up both the drink and the word from Roman contact long before the Norman period, which is why related forms appear in German 'Wein' and Dutch 'wijn'. Over centuries the Old English 'win' shifted in pronunciation and gained its silent final 'e', settling into the modern spelling. The most useful thing to fix in memory is its homophone partner 'whine', a complaint or high-pitched sound; 'wine' has no 'h', matching its short Latin root 'vinum'.

How the word is built

• wine (single root, from Latin vinum 'wine'; no affixes)

Words that sound like wine

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• whine: To complain in a feeble, drawn-out, irritating way.