Chalet

How to spell chalet

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chalet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chalet mean?

1. nounA wooden house or cottage, typically with a sloping roof, found in mountain or holiday regions.

Chalet in a sentence

• The family rented a ski chalet for the whole half-term week.

• Snow piled up on the steep roof of the alpine chalet.

Where does chalet come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English from French in the late eighteenth century, borrowed from the Swiss French dialect word chalet, which named a herdsman's hut or dairy cabin in the Alpine pastures. The Franco-Provencal term is generally traced back to a pre-Latin Romance root, often linked to a word meaning a sheltered spot or rocky overhang, the same family that may lie behind words for a sheltered hollow. The literal early sense was the humble seasonal cabin where cattle were milked and cheese was made high in the mountains. As Alpine tourism grew in the 1800s, the meaning shifted upward in comfort to describe the picturesque wooden mountain houses and, later, any timber holiday cottage. The spelling trap is the silent French -et ending: the word ends in the sound 'ay' but keeps its French letters, so the final t is never pronounced and the e is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• chalet (Swiss French: a wooden Alpine hut), a diminutive form preserving the silent French -et ending