Cad
nounA man who behaves dishonourably or treacherously, especially toward women.
How to spell cad
3 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce cad
What does cad mean?
- nounA man who behaves dishonourably or treacherously, especially toward women.
Cad in a sentence
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He turned out to be a complete cad, lying to everyone who trusted him.
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Only a cad would abandon his family without a word.
Where does cad come from?
Language of origin: French
The word 'cad' began life as a clipped form of 'cadet', which English took from French, where 'cadet' meant a younger son or junior, going back through Provençal 'capdet' to the Latin 'caput', meaning 'head'. In the late 1700s 'cad' was used for a humble assistant or an unskilled helper, such as the man who collected fares on a coach. At Oxford and other universities it then narrowed to a slang label for a local townsman, somebody outside the privileged student set, and carried a sneering, snobbish edge. From there the sense hardened into its modern meaning: a man who behaves dishonourably, especially toward women. The short, blunt spelling simply mirrors the clipped, dismissive way the word was first thrown around.
How the word is built
- cad (a shortening of 'cadet', treated as a single root with no prefix or suffix)
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