Cardboard

How to spell cardboard

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cardboard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cardboard mean?

1. nounStiff, thick paper-based material used for boxes, packaging, and backing.
2. adjectiveStiff, flimsy, or lacking depth and realism, as if made of cardboard.

Cardboard in a sentence

• noun

  The movers packed the books into a sturdy cardboard box.

• adjective

  The film's cardboard characters never felt like real people.

• noun

  She cut a sheet of cardboard to back the picture frame.

• adjective

  Critics dismissed the novel's cardboard dialogue as lifeless.

Where does cardboard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cardboard is a transparent compound of two older English words, 'card' and 'board'. The 'card' element entered English in the 1400s through French 'carte', which came from Latin 'charta', meaning a leaf of papyrus or a sheet of paper; that same Latin root sits inside 'chart' and 'charter'. 'Board' is a native Germanic word from Old English 'bord', meaning a plank, table, or flat piece of timber. When the two were joined in the early nineteenth century, the new word simply described stiff, board-like sheets made by pressing layers of paper pulp together. Because each half is spelled in its own straightforward way, the only real spelling point is remembering that it is written as one solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• card (stiff thick paper)
• board (flat rigid sheet)