Wound

How to spell wound

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wound

What does wound mean?

1. nounAn injury to living tissue, especially a cut, tear, or puncture in the skin or flesh.
2. verbTo inflict an injury on a person or animal, or to hurt someone's feelings.
3. verbThe past tense and past participle of 'wind', meaning to have coiled, twisted, or turned something.

Wound in a sentence

• noun

  The nurse cleaned the wound before applying a fresh dressing.

• verb

  A stray bullet can easily wound a bystander.

• verb

  She wound the bandage carefully around her ankle.

• noun

  The deep wound on his arm needed several stitches.

• verb

  Careless remarks like that can deeply wound a close friend.

• verb

  The old clock had not been wound in weeks, so it stopped.

Where does wound come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The injury sense of this word comes straight from the Old English noun and verb 'wund', which meant a hurt, sore, or bodily injury caused by cutting or piercing. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Saxon 'wunda', Old High German 'wunta', and modern German 'Wunde', all carrying the same meaning. The original sense was firmly physical, a break in the skin or flesh, and only later did English extend it to emotional and reputational hurts, as in wounding someone's pride. Quite separately, the spelling 'wound' is also the past tense and past participle of the verb 'wind' (to coil or turn), which descends from the unrelated Old English verb 'windan', meaning to twist or wind. These two words are pure homographs that happened to converge on the same letters: the injury 'wound' rhymes with 'mooned', while the coiling 'wound' rhymes with 'found', and that split pronunciation is the spelling trap.

How the word is built

• wound (from Old English wund: a hurt or injury), a single unsplit root with no affixes; the identical spelling of the past tense of 'wind' comes from a separate Old English verb windan