Cockroaches

How to spell cockroaches

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cockroaches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cockroaches mean?

1. nounFlat-bodied nocturnal insects, often regarded as household pests, that thrive in warm and unsanitary places.

Cockroaches in a sentence

• The tenants reported cockroaches scurrying behind the kitchen cupboards.

• Exterminators sealed the cracks where the cockroaches had been nesting.

Where does cockroaches come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes from the Spanish cucaracha, the name for the same scuttling insect, which itself was built on cuca, a Spanish word for a kind of caterpillar or grub. When English speakers first met the creature in the early 1600s, around the time of colonial contact with the Spanish-speaking world, they heard cucaracha and reshaped it into the more familiar English-sounding pieces 'cock' and 'roach', a classic case of folk etymology where an unfamiliar foreign word is bent toward words the ear already knows. Neither 'cock' (the bird) nor 'roach' (the fish) has anything genuinely to do with the insect; they are simply sounds that the original Spanish was forced into. Over time English speakers shortened the full word and began calling the insects simply 'roaches', so the standalone noun 'roach' is actually a back-formation from this reshaped borrowing. The doubled middle and the silent-feeling vowel cluster in 'roaches' are the main spelling traps, both inherited from this awkward marriage of Spanish sound and English guesswork.

How the word is built

• cock (folk-altered from Spanish cuca)
• roach (clipped form)
• -es (plural suffix)