Cuddle

How to spell cuddle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cuddle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cuddle mean?

1. verbTo hold someone or something close in your arms in a warm, affectionate way.
2. nounAn affectionate hold or close embrace.

Cuddle in a sentence

• verb

  The toddler liked to cuddle his stuffed rabbit before falling asleep.

• noun

  The baby settled down after a long cuddle from her mother.

• verb

  On cold mornings the cat would cuddle against the radiator.

• noun

  He gave the nervous puppy a gentle cuddle to calm it down.

Where does cuddle come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Cuddle is one of those homely English words whose exact origins remain genuinely murky, and most dictionaries label it as uncertain. It first appears in the early 1500s with the sense of holding someone closely and affectionately, and it may be a softened, intimate variant of older dialect words such as 'cull' or 'coll', meaning to embrace, which in turn trace back through Old French to the Latin collum for 'neck' (the idea being to put one's arms about another's neck). Some scholars instead link it to 'coddle', meaning to treat tenderly, and the two words clearly influenced each other over time. The cosy, nursery feel of the word suggests it grew up partly as imitative baby-talk, which is common for terms of affection. Whatever its precise route, the spelling settled with a doubled 'd' to lock in the short, clipped 'u' sound, the same pattern seen in 'puddle', 'huddle' and 'muddle'. Because the origin is disputed, this entry is given with low confidence.

How the word is built

• cuddle (single root, no clear prefix or suffix); the doubled -dd- keeps the short 'u' sound