of
pronunciation
How to pronounce of in British English:
UK [əv]
How to pronounce of in American English:
US [ʌv]
Word Origin
- of
- of: [OE] Of has an ancient ancestry, going back to the prehistoric Indo-European preposition of ‘removal’ or ‘origin’, *ap. Its Germanic descendant was *ab, source of modern German ab (now only an adverb, meaning ‘away’), Dutch af, Swedish av, and English of. Latin ab ‘from’ (as in English abduct, abject, etc) also came from Indo-European *ap.=> off
- of (prep.)
- Old English of, unstressed form of æf (prep., adv.) "away, away from," from Proto-Germanic *af (cognates: Old Norse af, Old Frisian af, of "of," Dutch af "off, down," German ab "off, from, down"), from PIE *apo- "off, away" (see apo-). Primary sense in Old English still was "away," but shifted in Middle English with use of the word to translate Latin de, ex, and especially Old French de, which had come to be the substitute for the genitive case. "Of shares with another word of the same length, as, the evil glory of being accessory to more crimes against grammar than any other." [Fowler] Also from 1837 a non-standard or dialectal representation of have as pronounced in unstressed positions (could of, must of, etc.)
Synonym
Example
- 1. The analysis of friendliness is much the same .
- 2. This is part of a shift in how big drug firms do business .
- 3. Every house has a soul , an energy of itself .
- 4. The original diagnosis of greece was wrong .
- 5. Mr venizelos has problems of his own .