Castle

How to spell castle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce castle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does castle mean?

1. nounA large fortified building or set of buildings, typically from the medieval period, built to defend against attack.
2. verbIn chess, to make a defensive move that swaps the positions of the king and a rook in a single turn.

Castle in a sentence

• noun

  The medieval castle still has its original stone walls and moat.

• verb

  Experienced players often castle early to keep the king safe.

• noun

  Tourists queue for hours to tour the royal castle each summer.

• verb

  She chose to castle on the kingside before launching her attack.

Where does castle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin castellum, which literally meant 'a little fort' and was the diminutive of castrum, a fortified military camp or stronghold. As the Roman world gave way to medieval Europe, the word travelled into Old Northern French as castel, and it entered Old English well before the Norman Conquest to describe the fortified residences that lords were building. The familiar silent 't' in the middle is the very thing that trips writers, but it is a genuine survivor of that castel form rather than a later decoration. The same castrum root also lies hidden in many English place names ending in -caster, -chester and -cester, such as Lancaster and Manchester, which mark sites of old Roman forts. Knowing that castle and chester share an ancestor can help fix the spelling, since both keep the hard 'c' and the buried 't'.

How the word is built

• castel- (from Latin castellum: fortified place)
• -le (English spelling of the diminutive ending)