Woe

How to spell woe

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce woe

What does woe mean?

1. nounGreat sorrow, grief, or a cause of misfortune and distress.

Woe in a sentence

• The long memoir recounts a life filled with grief and woe.

• Financial woe forced the family to sell their home.

Where does woe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Woe comes from the Old English wa, an instinctive cry of grief or distress, and it has close relatives across the Germanic languages such as the German weh and the Dutch wee, all echoing the same exclamation of pain. At root it is one of those words that began as a natural sound a person makes when hurt or mourning, rather than a coined term, which is why it has stayed so short and blunt. Over the centuries it settled into a noun meaning deep sorrow, misfortune, or affliction, and it survived in solemn and literary phrasing such as 'woe is me' and 'tales of woe'. The plural 'woes' came to mean the specific troubles or hardships that beset someone. The spelling trap is the silent ending: it is a single syllable written with a final 'e' that you do not hear, and it is easily confused in sound with the unrelated exclamation 'whoa' used to halt a horse.

How the word is built

• woe (from Old English wa, a cry of grief)

Words that sound like woe

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

• whoa: An exclamation used to tell someone or something to stop or slow down, or to express sudden surprise.