Other forms: echoes, echoed, echoing, echos
An echo is your own sound coming back at you after it hits something hard and far away. Shout in a tunnel, in an empty church, across a valley, and the shout returns a beat later, thinner than it left.
The verb works two ways. A place echoes, as in the hall echoed with footsteps, and a person echoes, repeating what someone else said or thought: she echoed his words back at him across the table. An echo can also be a trace of something older, so people talk about echoes of the war in a town's street names. Watch the plural, which takes an extra e: echoes. And an echo chamber is now the standard name for a place where people hear only their own opinions repeated back.
1nounechoA sound that comes back to you after bouncing off a surface.
“The echo came back off the cliff two seconds later.”
2verbplaceOf a sound or a place: to bounce back and be heard again.
“Their voices echoed down the empty corridor.”
3verbrepeatTo repeat what someone else has said or thought.
“The report echoes what the nurses have been saying for years.”
4nountraceA trace or reminder of something earlier.
“There are echoes of his father in the way he speaks.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
echo is a sound.
Echo came into English from Ancient Greek ekho, built on ekhe, which meant simply sound. It travelled through Latin echo and Medieval Latin into Middle English, where it was written eccho and ekko before the spelling settled. The Greek word may share a root with sough, the old English name for the sighing noise of wind.
Middle English
eccho
English, today
echo
Built from
From Middle English eccho. From Middle English eccho, ecco, echo, ekko, from Medieval Latin ēccō, from Latin ēchō, from Ancient Greek ἠχώ, from ἠχή (“sound”). Possibly from the same Proto-Indo-European - root as sough.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA