Other forms: spelling, spelled, spells
To spell a word is to give its letters in the right order, one after another. Children spell out loud in class, you spell your surname down the phone twice and it still comes back wrong, and autocorrect spells for you whether you asked it to or not.
A spell is also a piece of magic — the words said over a pot, the thing that turns a prince into a frog — and someone under your spell is fascinated by you. A third spell is a stretch of time: a cold spell, a spell in hospital, a spell as captain. The verb reaches past letters as well, and there it means makes certain — a wet spring spells trouble, a lost contract spells the end of the firm. Both spelt and spelled are correct, one on each side of the Atlantic.
1verbspellTo name or write the letters of a word in the right order.~35%
“Nobody spells my name right the first time.”
2nouncharmWords believed to work magic, or the state of being under them.~25%
“The witch broke the spell at midnight.”
synonyms: charm, enchantment
3nounperiodA stretch of time during which something goes on.~38%
“We had a dry spell that lasted the whole of June.”
4verbresultTo make a result certain.~2%
“A wet spring spells trouble for the harvest.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 147 sentences found in the wild and placed 139 of them on a sense (8 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English spell was news, or a story told aloud — Icelandic still keeps guðspjall for its gospel — and the magic spell is that same word. Spelling out letters looks like an import, Old French espeler, but it merged with the native Old English verb spellian, to tell or speak, a relative of the story word: both go back to Proto-Germanic *spellōną. Only the spell of time is a real stranger — Old English spelian, to stand in the place of another, so you spelled a man at his work and took his turn.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)pel- — to tell
Proto-Germanic
*spellą — speech, account, tale
Old English
spell — news, story
Middle English
spell
English, today
spell
From Middle English spell, spel, from Old English spell (“news, story”), from Proto-Germanic spellą (“speech, account, tale”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)pel- (“to tell”) or from Proto-Indo-European bʰel- (“to speak, to sound”) with the s-mobile prefix. Cognate with dialectal German Spill, Icelandic spjall (“discussion, talk”), spjalla (“to discuss, to talk”), guðspjall (“gospel”) and Albanian fjalë (“word”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA