Yesterday

How to spell yesterday

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce yesterday

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does yesterday mean?

1. nounThe day immediately before today.
2. adverbOn the day before today.

Yesterday in a sentence

• noun

  The parcel arrived yesterday afternoon while she was at work.

• adverb

  We paid the electricity bill yesterday before the deadline.

• noun

  He finished the report yesterday and sent it to his manager.

• adverb

  The train was delayed yesterday because of the storm.

Where does yesterday come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Yesterday comes straight from Old English giestrandæg, a compound joining giestran or geostran, meaning 'the day before today', with dæg, meaning 'day'. The first element has deep Germanic roots and is related to similar words in Dutch (gisteren) and German (gestern), all tracing back to a shared ancestor that simply meant 'the previous day'. Interestingly, the same ancient root sits behind the Latin hesternus and is distantly connected to the Greek and Sanskrit words for 'yesterday', showing how old and widespread the idea is across the language family. The 'yester-' element once stood alone and could even point in the other direction, but in modern English it survives almost exclusively in compounds like yesterday and the more literary yesteryear. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle: writers hear 'yes-ter-day' but sometimes drop the silent flow of the 'ter' or confuse the vowel, even though the word is built transparently from 'yester' plus 'day'.

How the word is built

• yester- (the day before, from Old English geostran)
• day (the 24-hour period)