Cactus

How to spell cactus

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cactus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cactus mean?

1. nounA spiny, fleshy plant adapted to dry climates, storing water in its thick stem and usually bearing no true leaves.

Cactus in a sentence

• A small cactus sat in a clay pot on the office windowsill.

• The desert trail was lined with tall cactus shapes against the evening sky.

Where does cactus come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Latin cactus, which the Romans borrowed from the Greek kaktos. In ancient Greek kaktos did not name the spiny desert plants we picture today; it referred to a prickly, thistle-like plant native to Sicily, possibly the cardoon. When European naturalists encountered the strange, water-storing succulents of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they reached for this old classical word, and the botanist Linnaeus formally fixed it as the genus name Cactus in the eighteenth century. The plural can follow either the Latin pattern as cacti or the plain English pattern as cactuses, which is the main thing writers pause over. The single c followed by ct in the middle is the spot to watch, since the word is otherwise spelled exactly as it sounds.

How the word is built

• cact- (from Greek kaktos, a spiny plant)
• -us (Latin singular noun ending)