Cod

How to spell cod

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cod

What does cod mean?

1. nounA large cold-water sea fish widely caught and eaten as food.

Cod in a sentence

• The chip shop battered a fresh fillet of cod.

• Trawlers off the coast brought in tonnes of cod.

Where does cod come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Cod is a genuinely puzzling little word whose origins have never been settled with confidence. It appears in English from around the 1300s as a name for the large cold-water sea fish, but no one is certain where the name came from. One popular suggestion links it to an older English sense of 'cod' meaning a bag or pouch (the same word that survives in 'codpiece' and in the old name for a pea pod), the idea being that the fish has a baggy, rounded body. Others connect it to words in Germanic neighbours, though the matches are loose and far from proven. The informal British sense 'to hoax or parody', and the dismissive prefix in phrases like 'cod-Latin' for mock or fake Latin, grew up much later and may be an entirely separate playful coinage. Because the threads do not tie together neatly, the safest verdict is that the true source of cod is simply unknown.

How the word is built

• cod (single root; an unanalysable Middle English noun, no prefix or suffix)