Cordon

How to spell cordon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cordon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cordon mean?

1. nounA line of police, soldiers, or barriers placed around an area to control access.
2. verbTo enclose or seal off an area with a guarded line or barrier.

Cordon in a sentence

• noun

  Police set up a cordon around the abandoned suitcase.

• verb

  Officers will cordon off the street while engineers inspect the gas leak.

• noun

  Reporters waited just outside the security cordon near the embassy.

• verb

  Staff moved quickly to cordon the spill before customers wandered into it.

Where does cordon come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived from French cordon, a diminutive of corde meaning 'cord' or 'rope', so it literally named a small cord or ribbon. French in turn took corde from the Latin chorda, meaning 'string' or 'gut', which itself was borrowed from the Greek khorde, the word for the string of a musical instrument or an animal's gut. English adopted cordon in the 1500s, at first for an ornamental cord or ribbon worn as a badge of honour, and the sense survives in the grand cookery title 'cordon bleu', literally 'blue ribbon'. By the 1700s military writers were using it for a line of troops or posts strung out to guard or blockade an area, picturing that line as a continuous cord drawn around a place. That guarding sense gave the familiar modern police cordon, and the spelling keeps the French shape intact, ending in -on rather than the English 'cord' you might expect.

How the word is built

• cord (from French corde: cord, rope)
• -on (French diminutive suffix: a small cord)