odd
/ɔd/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.42 in modern English
5
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
2
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Without a corresponding mate in a pair or set; unmatched; (of a pair or set) mismatched.
adj
Scattered; occasional, infrequent; not forming part of a set or pattern.
Example Sentences
- "She slept in, which was very odd."
- "We made an odd party before the arrival of the Ten, particularly when the Celebrity dropped in for lunch or dinner. He could not be induced to remain permanently at Mohair because Miss Trevor was at Asquith, but he appropriated a Hempstead cart from the Mohair stables and made the trip sometimes twice in a day."
- "Jena Janovy is a strange bird—a college basketball player who is a) female and b) short (5 feet 3 inches) and, perhaps oddest of all, lets neither of those things dampen her rabid enthusiasm for the game."
- "Did Mary (I thought it was odd that they always called her Mary even though her name was Mary Anne, and odder that Mom refused to correct them) have time for some questions?"
- "[One of them would] say, 'Hi, Mother.' This might be Chrissie with the purple hair and black lipstick, or Adam, who usually wore odd leather stuff. Sometimes 'Hi' was all I heard; other times they'd stay and talk for a minute."
- "Optimistically, he had a corner of a drawer for odd socks."
Etymology
From Middle English odde, od (“odd (not even); leftover after division into pairs”), from Old Norse oddi (“odd, third or additional number; triangle”), from oddr (“point of a weapon”), from Proto-Germanic *uzdaz (“point”), from Proto-Indo-European *wes- (“to stick, prick, pierce, sting”) + *dʰeh₁- (“to set, place”). Cognate to Icelandic oddi (“triangle, point of land, odd number”), Swedish udda (“odd”), udd (“a point”), Danish od (“point of weapon”) and odde (“a headland, point”), Norwegian Bokmål odde (“a point”, “odd”, “peculiar”); related to Old English ord (“a point”). Doublet of ord ("point").
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɔd/
- British English: /ɒd/