Caste

How to spell caste

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce caste

What does caste mean?

1. nounA hereditary social class, especially within the traditional Hindu system of rigidly separated ranks.

Caste in a sentence

• The documentary examined how caste still shapes marriage decisions in some rural villages.

• Sociologists debate whether a rigid caste system can ever fully break down under modern economics.

Where does caste come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word came into English in the 1500s and 1600s from the Spanish and Portuguese word 'casta', which meant 'race', 'breed', or 'lineage' and literally carried the sense of something 'pure' or 'unmixed'. The Portuguese applied 'casta' to the rigid hereditary social divisions they encountered among the people of India, and the term stuck as the standard English name for that system. The root traces back to the Latin 'castus', meaning 'pure', 'chaste', or 'cut off from impurity', which is the same source that gives us the English word 'chaste'. The idea of a group kept pure by birth and forbidden to mix neatly captures both the original Latin sense and the social meaning the word carries today. The silent final -e, a relic of its Romance spelling, is the spelling trap, because it makes the word look and sound exactly like the verb 'cast'.

How the word is built

• caste (a borrowing of Spanish/Portuguese casta: race, lineage), preserved whole in English; the final -e distinguishes it from the verb 'cast'

Words that sound like caste

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cast: To throw something with force or to direct it outward.