aunt
/eɪnt/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.16 in modern English
4
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The sister or sister-in-law of one’s parent.
noun
The female cousin or cousin-in-law of one’s parent.
noun
A woman of an older generation than oneself, especially a friend of one's parents, by means of fictive kin.
Example Sentences
- "As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle... the clan has a tendency to ignore me."
- "I saw neither hope of his reclaiming, nor comfort in his being; and was it not then better bestowed upon his uncle than upon one of his aunts?—I need not say bawd, for every one knows what aunt stands for in the last translation."
Etymology
From Middle English aunte, from Anglo-Norman aunte, from Old French ante, from Latin amita (“father's sister”). Displaced native Middle English modrie (“aunt”) (from Old English mōdriġe (“maternal aunt”); compare Old English faþu, faþe (“paternal aunt”)). Notes on pronunciation and spelling The digraph ⟨au⟩ representing /æ ~ ɑː/ (rather than /ɔː/) is irregular. It likely reflects a development of Middle English /au̯/ to [aː~æː] before /m n/ in some varieties of Early Modern English, which later came to be identified with either /æ/ or [æː] from pre-fricative lengthening (in the latter case, creating a phoneme /æː/; this is the basis of the bath lexical set). Such pronunciations historically competed with more learned ones where /au̯/ underwent its normal development to /ɔː/, with the standard language eventually adopting /æ ~ ɑː/ in words that came to be spelt with ⟨a⟩ and /ɔː/ in those which came to be spelt with ⟨au⟩ except in this word. However, dialects may have /æ/ or /ɑː/ in other words such as launch, especially in the UK. An alternative explanation derives /æ ~ ɑː/ in this word (and other instances of bath before /m n/) from a collateral Middle English form with /a/, which would've undergone lengthening before nasals analogous to that occuring before fricatives. Though such a collateral form may be ancestral to pronunciations with /a ~ æ/ in some varieties, this hypothesis cannot explain why inherited instances of bath before /m n/ only derive from Middle English words which had variants in /au̯m au̯n/.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /eɪnt/