Caterpillar

How to spell caterpillar

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce caterpillar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does caterpillar mean?

1. nounThe wormlike larval stage of a butterfly or moth, which feeds on leaves before becoming a pupa.

Caterpillar in a sentence

• A fat green caterpillar was chewing through the cabbage leaves.

• The children watched the caterpillar slowly inch along the branch.

Where does caterpillar come from?

Language of origin: French

Caterpillar most likely comes from the Old French chatepelose, which literally meant 'hairy cat', combining chate, 'female cat', with pelose, 'hairy' (related to Latin pilosus, from pilus meaning 'hair'). The image was vivid: a small fuzzy crawling creature that looked like a tiny bristly cat. When the word entered English in the fifteenth century, the unfamiliar French ending was reshaped under the influence of the native word 'piller', meaning a plunderer or stripper of plants, since caterpillars famously strip leaves bare. That folk reshaping is exactly why the modern spelling ends in 'pillar' rather than anything closer to the original French, and why the second half looks deceptively like the architectural 'pillar' even though the two are unrelated. The opening 'cater' has nothing to do with catering food; it preserves the old 'cat' element, so the trap for writers is the unstressed middle 'er' and the surprising double-l 'pillar' ending.

How the word is built

• cater- (from Old French chate: she-cat)
• pillar (altered from pelose: hairy)