Cavalry

How to spell cavalry

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cavalry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cavalry mean?

1. nounSoldiers who fight on horseback, or, in modern armies, the armoured and mobile units that replaced them.

Cavalry in a sentence

• The museum exhibit traced how the cavalry charged across the open field.

• During the battle the cavalry outflanked the infantry on the left.

Where does cavalry come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English through French cavalerie, which English speakers adopted in the late 1500s for mounted soldiers. The French term came in turn from Italian cavalleria, meaning a body of horsemen, built on cavallo, the ordinary Italian word for a horse. Behind all of these stands the Latin caballus, which originally meant a workhorse or nag rather than a noble steed, in contrast to the more dignified Latin equus. The same caballus root gave us 'cavalier', 'chivalry' and even the French 'cheval', so a whole family of horse and knight words share this ancestry. The spelling trap is real: cavalry is constantly muddled with Calvary, the hill of the crucifixion, because the consonants l and v get swapped; remembering that cavalry contains 'caval' (horse) keeps the order straight.

How the word is built

• caval- (from Latin caballus: horse)
• -ry (collective/group noun suffix)