Chuckle
verbTo laugh quietly or to oneself, often with amusement rather than loud delight.
How to spell chuckle
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce chuckle
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does chuckle mean?
- verbTo laugh quietly or to oneself, often with amusement rather than loud delight.
- nounA quiet or partly suppressed laugh.
Chuckle in a sentence
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verb
The old photographs made her chuckle at the memory.
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noun
A soft chuckle escaped him as he read the message.
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verb
He tried not to chuckle during the serious meeting.
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noun
Her dry comment drew a chuckle from the whole office.
Where does chuckle come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Chuckle first appears in English in the late 1500s and was formed from the older verb 'chuck', which meant to cluck like a hen or to make a low, clucking noise in the throat. To that base English added the frequentative ending '-le', a suffix that signals a small or repeated action, the same ending seen in 'crackle', 'sparkle', and 'wriggle'. The word is essentially imitative, an attempt to capture in spelling the soft, broken sound of suppressed laughter. Over time the meaning narrowed from a general clucking noise to the specific idea of laughing quietly to oneself. The spelling can trip writers because the opening 'ch' makes the same sound as the 'tch' in 'kitchen', yet here it is written simply 'ch', and the unstressed second syllable hides the schwa vowel in '-le'.
How the word is built
- chuck (to make a clucking, laughing sound)
- -le (frequentative suffix indicating a small, repeated action)
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