Cape

How to spell cape

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cape

What does cape mean?

1. nounA sleeveless outer garment that fastens at the neck and hangs loosely over the shoulders and back.
2. nounA point or headland of land that projects out into a sea or lake.

Cape in a sentence

• The magician swept his black cape across the stage.

• The lighthouse stands on a rocky cape at the edge of the bay.

• She wore a wool cape instead of a coat in the cold.

• Sailors round the southern cape when the wind drops.

Where does cape come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This little word carries two separate Latin ancestors that happen to land on the same spelling. The garment sense comes from the Late Latin cappa, meaning a 'hooded cloak', which passed through Old French and Provençal cape before reaching English in the 1500s as a short sleeveless covering worn over the shoulders; the same cappa root also gave us 'cap', 'cope', and 'chapel'. The geographic sense traces instead to the Latin caput, literally 'head', which the Romance languages used figuratively for a 'head of land' jutting into the sea; it came into English through Old French cap in the 1300s. So the spelling trap is mild: both meanings settled on the simple, regular form 'cape' with a silent final e marking the long vowel. Knowing that one cape sits on your shoulders and the other is the 'head' of a coastline helps fix both senses to the single tidy spelling.

How the word is built

• cape (single root; from Latin cappa 'hooded cloak' for the garment, and Latin caput 'head' for the headland)