Chaos

How to spell chaos

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chaos

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chaos mean?

1. nounComplete disorder and confusion.

Chaos in a sentence

• The room was in complete chaos.

• After the announcement, total chaos broke out.

Where does chaos come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the ancient Greek khaos, which literally meant 'a yawning gap', 'empty space', or 'abyss'. In Greek creation stories, Chaos was the formless void that existed before the ordered universe came into being, so the word carried a sense of vast, shapeless emptiness rather than the noisy disorder we mean today. Latin borrowed the term as chaos, and it passed into English in the fifteenth century, at first keeping the theological idea of the unformed mass that preceded creation. By the seventeenth century the meaning had drifted toward the modern sense of complete confusion and disorder. The unusual 'ch' spelling, pronounced like a hard 'k', is a direct fingerprint of its Greek origin, the same khi sound that gives us 'chorus', 'character', and 'echo', and it is exactly that silent-looking 'ch' that makes the word a small spelling trap.

How the word is built

• chao- (from Greek khaos: empty space, abyss)
• -s (noun ending)