Dictionaries › English

hollow

Pronunciation: /ˈhɒləʊ/

The English word “hollow” has 14 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A small valley between mountains.
  2. A sunken area on a surface.
  3. An unfilled space in something solid; a cavity, natural or artificial.
  4. A feeling of emptiness.

verb

  1. to make a hole in something; to excavate
  2. To call or urge by shouting; to hollo.

adjective

  1. Having an empty space or cavity inside.
  2. Distant, eerie; echoing, reverberating, as if in a hollow space; dull, muffled; often low-pitched.
  3. Without substance; having no real or significant worth; meaningless.
  4. Insincere, devoid of validity; specious.
  5. Concave; gaunt; sunken.
  6. Pertaining to hollow body position
  7. Synonym of empty (“lacking between the onset of tasting and the finish”).

adverb

  1. Completely, as part of the phrase beat hollow or beat all hollow.

Etymology

From Middle English holow, holowe, holwe, holwȝ, holgh, from Old English holh (“a hollow”), from Proto-West Germanic *holh, from Proto-Germanic *hulwiją, from Proto-Germanic *hulaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱel- (“to cover, hide”). Cognate with Old High German huliwa and hulwa, Middle High German hülwe. Related to hole.

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “hollow” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.