Word
nounA single distinct unit of language, made of sounds or letters, that carries meaning.
How to spell word
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce word
What does word mean?
- nounA single distinct unit of language, made of sounds or letters, that carries meaning.
- verbTo express or phrase something in a particular choice of language.
Word in a sentence
-
noun
She could not recall the right word for the part on the form.
-
verb
The lawyer helped them word the complaint more carefully.
-
noun
The contract uses one word that nobody on the team understood.
-
verb
Try to word the email so it does not sound abrupt.
Where does word come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a thoroughly native English word, inherited directly from Old English word, which already meant a unit of speech or a single utterance. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic form wurda, and you can still see its close relatives in Dutch woord and German Wort, which carry exactly the same meaning. Further back, scholars connect it to the same ancient Indo-European root that gave Latin verbum, meaning a word or a verb, and the Greek eirein, meaning to speak; that link is why English verb and word are distant cousins. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years, and because it is so short and so familiar it presents almost no trap for a modern writer. The shift in vowel sound, where the spelled or is pronounced like er, is a regular English pattern shared by words such as work and world.
How the word is built
- word (a single native root noun from Old English word; not built from prefix or suffix)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.