spurt
/spɜɹt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.84 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A moment, a short period of time.
noun
The act of spurting, or something spurted
Example Sentences
- "Thus the small jet, which hasty hands unlock, / Spurts in the gardener's eyes who turns the cock."
- "With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the . . . Oh, my God! My God! What have I done?"
- "In the floor of the valley the line passes hills of fantastic shape, like sleeping camels and inverted washbasins, and you can see the beautiful lakes Naivasha and Elementeita; at Eburru jets of steam spurt out of the ground."
- "a spurt of water; a spurt of blood"
- ""Clean all your spurt off me, man." And so I did."
- "The Garden Sperages[…]send out at first certaine greene spurts or buds peeping forth of the ground."
Etymology
From earlier spirt, sprit (“to sprout”), from Middle English sprytten, from Old English spryttan, from Proto-West Germanic *spruttjan, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *(s)per- (“to strew, sow, sprinkle”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: sprytten, spryttan, *spruttjan, *(s)per-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /spɜɹt/
- British English: /spɜːt/