Beagle

How to spell beagle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce beagle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does beagle mean?

1. nounA small to medium hound with a short coat and long ears, bred for tracking by scent.

Beagle in a sentence

• The family adopted a beagle from the local rescue shelter.

• A beagle will follow an interesting scent for hours.

Where does beagle come from?

Language of origin: French

The origin of beagle is genuinely uncertain, and dictionaries flag it as such. The most widely repeated suggestion traces it to the Old French word begueule, meaning roughly 'open throat' or 'noisy mouth', built from beer 'to gape' and gueule 'throat or mouth'; this would playfully describe a small hound famous for its loud, baying voice. Another proposal links it to a Celtic or French root meaning simply 'small'. The word appears in English from the 1400s as the name for a compact scenting hound used to hunt hare. Because the spelling never matched a clear English root, the silent vowel cluster 'ea' followed by the soft '-gle' ending has stayed put for centuries. That mismatch between the long 'ee' sound and the written 'ea' is exactly the trap modern writers fall into.

How the word is built

• beagle (single root, possibly from Old French be(e)gueule: gaping throat); no productive prefix or suffix