Camouflage

How to spell camouflage

10 letters · 3 syllables

83 of the 186 people asked to spell camouflage in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is camoflauge. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

camoflauge camouflage

What people typed instead

• camoflauge39 people
• camoflage14 people
• camoflague12 people
• camouflague3 people

How to pronounce camouflage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does camouflage mean?

1. nounColoured patterns, materials, or natural features used to disguise something by helping it blend into its surroundings.

Camouflage in a sentence

• The lizard's camouflage is amazing.

• Soldiers wear camouflage in the field.

Where does camouflage come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French verb camoufler, meaning 'to disguise' or 'to make up for the stage', a term from Parisian slang that itself may trace back to the Italian camuffare, 'to disguise or muffle up'. The noun camouflage entered English during the First World War, around 1917, when armies began painting equipment and draping netting to hide it from aerial observation and the new threat of reconnaissance aircraft. Before that surge of military use the idea was largely theatrical, the art of altering an appearance so the eye is fooled. The unusual spelling preserves its French shape intact: the silent-looking 'ou', the 'fl' cluster, and the soft '-age' ending that sounds like 'ahzh' rather than the English '-idge'. That foreign skeleton is exactly the trap, since the word is spelled nothing like it is pronounced.

How the word is built

• camoufl- (from French camoufler: to disguise)
• -age (noun suffix)

People who misspell camouflage also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got camouflage wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• ordnance 100% of them got it wrong
• butte 93% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 86% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 81% of them got it wrong
• jus 80% of them got it wrong
• embarrassing 77% of them got it wrong