Crocodile

How to spell crocodile

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce crocodile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crocodile mean?

1. nounA large predatory water reptile with thick scaly skin, a long snout, and powerful jaws, found in tropical rivers and swamps.

Crocodile in a sentence

• The tour guide warned the group that a crocodile had been seen near the riverbank.

• A documentary about the wetlands showed a crocodile lying motionless in the shallows.

Where does crocodile come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word reaches English from the Ancient Greek krokodilos, which the Greeks used for the great reptile of the Nile. The traditional explanation breaks it into krokē, meaning 'pebble' or 'shingle', and drilos, meaning 'worm', so the literal sense was roughly 'the worm of the stones', supposedly because the creatures were seen basking on pebbly riverbanks. The Greek term passed into Latin as crocodilus, and from there into Old French, where it appeared in distorted forms such as cocodrille. Middle English borrowed those garbled French versions before scholars in the Renaissance restored the spelling to match the classical crocodilus, which is why the modern form keeps the tidy croco- opening. That learned correction is also the reason the tricky middle vowel is an 'o' (croc-O-dile) rather than the 'a' many writers expect to hear.

How the word is built

• croco- (from Greek krokē, pebble)
• -dile (from Greek drilos, worm)