Cord

How to spell cord

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cord

What does cord mean?

1. nounA length of thin rope, string, or flexible electrical cable.
2. nounA flexible structure in the body resembling a length of string, such as the spinal cord or vocal cords.

Cord in a sentence

• The lamp would not switch on because the cord was unplugged.

• The injury damaged his spinal cord and affected his balance.

• She tied the parcel shut with a length of strong cord.

• The surgeon clamped the umbilical cord moments after the birth.

Where does cord come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word travelled into English from the Greek khorde, which literally meant 'gut' or 'string', since the earliest strings and ropes were often made from animal gut. The Greek term passed into Latin as chorda, keeping the sense of a string or cord, and from there into Old French as corde, meaning a thick string or rope. English adopted it around the 1300s in the simplified spelling 'cord', dropping the Latin 'h'. The musical word 'chord' looks like a relative but actually came from a different route, being a shortened form of 'accord', and the 'h' was later added by scholars who wrongly linked it to chorda; that crossed history is exactly why 'cord' and 'chord' are such a persistent spelling trap. The same gut-string ancestor also survives in the medical word 'cordon' and in 'cordage', the collective term for a ship's ropes.

How the word is built

• cord (from Latin chorda / Greek khorde: string, gut)

Words that sound like cord

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• chord: A group of musical notes sounded together as a single harmony.