Crochet

How to spell crochet

7 letters · 2 syllables

3 of the 36 people asked to spell crochet in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce crochet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crochet mean?

1. nounA handicraft in which yarn is looped into fabric using a single hooked needle.
2. verbTo create fabric or an item by looping yarn with a hooked needle.

Crochet in a sentence

• noun

  She learned crochet from her grandmother during the winter holidays.

• verb

  She likes to crochet scarves to give away as gifts.

• noun

  The blanket on the sofa was made entirely by crochet.

• verb

  He taught himself to crochet from online video tutorials.

Where does crochet come from?

Language of origin: French

Crochet comes directly from French, where crochet means 'a little hook', the diminutive of croche, an old word for a hook or curved tool. That in turn traces back to the Frankish and broader Germanic root that also gives English the word 'crook', meaning a bent or hooked shape. The craft is named for the small hooked needle used to pull loops of yarn through one another, so the name is really just 'the little hook' applied to the work it produces. English adopted the term in the early nineteenth century, around the 1810s, as the needlework technique became fashionable, and it kept its French spelling and pronunciation wholesale. That borrowed French form is exactly why the word is a spelling trap: the final 't' is silent and the 'ch' is sounded like 'sh', so it sounds like 'kroh-SHAY' but looks nothing like it on the page.

How the word is built

• croch- (from French croche: hook)
• -et (diminutive suffix: little hook)