Beetle

How to spell beetle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce beetle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does beetle mean?

1. nounAn insect with hard wing cases covering its body, belonging to the order Coleoptera.
2. verbTo move quickly with short busy steps, as if scurrying.

Beetle in a sentence

• noun

  A large black beetle crawled across the kitchen floor.

• verb

  Commuters tend to beetle across the station to catch the last train.

• noun

  The gardener found a beetle chewing through the rose leaves.

• verb

  She had to beetle off to the meeting before it started.

Where does beetle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The insect name comes from the Old English bitula or bitela, which meant literally 'the little biter', formed from the verb bitan, meaning 'to bite'. The name was a sensible description of a creature whose most obvious feature, to early English speakers, was its biting mandibles. Over the centuries the spelling settled on 'beetle', keeping the double 'e' that gives it its long vowel sound. The separate sense of a heavy wooden mallet has a different but also native root, the Old English bietel or betel, related to beatan, meaning 'to beat', which is why a tool for pounding shares the spelling. The verb meaning 'to hurry along' is much newer and grew from the image of a beetle scuttling busily across the ground.

How the word is built

• beet- (from Old English bitula 'biter', from bitan 'to bite')
• -le (noun suffix)