Cubicle

How to spell cubicle

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cubicle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cubicle mean?

1. nounA small partitioned space, especially a work area in an office or a private compartment in a changing room or library.

Cubicle in a sentence

• She spent the whole afternoon answering emails from her cubicle.

• The open-plan office was redesigned to give each employee a private cubicle.

Where does cubicle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin cubiculum, which meant a bedroom or sleeping chamber. That noun was built on the verb cubare, meaning literally 'to lie down', so a cubiculum was simply the little room where one reclined to rest. English borrowed cubicle in the fifteenth century, at first keeping the original sense of a sleeping compartment, such as a partitioned bed space in a dormitory. Over time the meaning broadened to any small partitioned enclosure, and in the twentieth century it settled into its now familiar office sense of a small work area divided by low walls. The same cubare root lies behind 'incubate', literally to lie on eggs, and the spelling trap is the quiet -icle ending, which sounds identical to the -ical of words like 'comical' yet is spelled quite differently.

How the word is built

• cub- (from Latin cubare: to lie down)
• -icle (diminutive suffix: small space)