Bugs

How to spell bugs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bugs

What does bugs mean?

1. nounSmall insects or creeping creatures, often regarded as pests.
2. nounFaults or errors in computer programs that cause them to behave incorrectly.
3. verbThird-person singular of 'bug': to annoy or pester someone repeatedly.

Bugs in a sentence

• noun

  The campers sprayed repellent to keep bugs away from the tent.

• noun

  The developers spent the weekend fixing bugs in the new release.

• verb

  The constant humming of the fridge really bugs him at night.

• noun

  Tiny bugs had eaten holes in the lettuce leaves.

• noun

  Users reported several bugs that crashed the app on startup.

• verb

  It bugs her when colleagues leave dirty mugs in the sink.

Where does bugs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'bug' has a murky history that scholars have never fully settled. It first appears in Middle English as 'bugge', meaning a frightening thing, a hobgoblin, or a bogey, and that older sense still survives in 'bugbear' and probably in 'bogeyman'. Its ultimate source is uncertain; some link it to a Celtic word for a ghost or terror, such as Welsh 'bwg', though the evidence is thin. By the seventeenth century the word had narrowed to mean a small crawling insect, especially a bedbug, perhaps because such pests were dreaded much like the old goblins. The figurative meanings grew from there: a 'bug' became a hidden fault in a machine and later in computer code, and the verb sense 'to pester or to plant a listening device' developed in twentieth-century American usage. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the only thing a writer has to remember is the plain plural ending, so it carries little trap.

How the word is built

• bug (root: insect, fault, or to pester)
• -s (plural noun marker, or third-person singular verb marker)