Cage
nounA box or enclosure with bars or wires used to confine animals or birds.
How to spell cage
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce cage
What does cage mean?
- nounA box or enclosure with bars or wires used to confine animals or birds.
- verbTo confine an animal or person in or as if in a barred enclosure.
Cage in a sentence
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noun
The parrot rattled the bars of its cage every morning.
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verb
They refused to cage such a wild bird indoors.
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noun
The zookeeper cleaned the lion cage before opening time.
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verb
The rescue team chose not to cage the injured fox.
Where does cage come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Cage came into English in the early 1200s from Old French cage, which descended from the Latin cavea, meaning a hollow space, a coop, or an enclosure for keeping animals. The Latin cavea was itself built on cavus, meaning hollow, the same root that gave us 'cave' and 'cavity'. The original idea was simply a hollowed-out or barred space, and over the centuries it narrowed to the familiar sense of a barred box for confining birds, beasts, or prisoners. Because the word is so short and the spelling so direct, the soft 'g' sound (as in 'gem') is captured cleanly by the final silent 'e', which is the one feature worth remembering.
How the word is built
- cage (single root from Latin cavea: hollow space, enclosure for animals)
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