Year

How to spell year

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce year

What does year mean?

1. nounA period of twelve months, especially as counted from January to December or measured from a fixed starting point.

Year in a sentence

• The company reported strong profits for the financial year.

• She finished her degree in just under a year.

Where does year come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English gear, which already meant a full cycle of the seasons or a period of twelve months. It traces back to a reconstructed Germanic form, and beyond that to an ancient Indo-European root meaning 'season' or 'spring', the idea of time turning round and coming back again. Close relatives survive across the Germanic languages, including the German Jahr and the Dutch jaar, all sharing that same ancestor. The spelling looks tricky because the early 'ge-' sound softened over the centuries into the 'y' glide we now hear, yet the vowel cluster 'ea' was kept on the page. That stable 'ea' spelling, even though it represents a single steady vowel sound, is the only real trap in an otherwise plain everyday word.

How the word is built

• year (single root from Old English gear, a period of twelve months); no prefix or suffix