Cockroach

How to spell cockroach

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cockroach

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cockroach mean?

1. nounA flat, fast-moving brown or black insect often regarded as a household pest.

Cockroach in a sentence

• The tenant found a cockroach scuttling across the kitchen floor at night.

• The restaurant was shut down after an inspector spotted a cockroach near the ovens.

Where does cockroach come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes from the Spanish cucaracha, the name for the same scuttling insect, which was itself built on cuca, a word for a kind of caterpillar or grub. English sailors and traders encountered the creature and its Spanish name in the early 1600s, and because cucaracha sounded unfamiliar, they reshaped it into something that looked like ordinary English. By a process called folk etymology, the front of the word was reinterpreted as 'cock' (as in the bird) and the end as 'roach' (already an English name for a freshwater fish), giving the modern spelling cockroach by the 1620s. The shortened form 'roach' that many people now use is therefore a back-formation, carved out of a word that never originally contained it. The spelling trap is the silent reminder that neither 'cock' nor 'roach' has anything to do with the insect's real Spanish origin, yet both halves are spelled exactly like the familiar English words.

How the word is built

• folk-etymology reshaping of Spanish cucaracha into cock
• roach (the recognisable English words 'cock' and 'roach' were grafted onto the foreign word)