Curly

How to spell curly

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce curly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does curly mean?

1. adjectiveHaving curls or a coiled, looping shape rather than being straight.

Curly in a sentence

• Her thick curly hair was hard to brush in the morning.

• The telephone cord was a tight curly spiral.

Where does curly come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Curly is built from the noun and verb curl plus the common adjective ending -y, which means 'having the quality of'. The base word curl is a Middle English form, originally spelled crulle or crull, and it appears to have come from Middle Dutch krul, meaning a twist or a ringlet of hair. Over time the letters in the cluster were swapped around, so the older crulle settled into the familiar curl, and the adjective curly emerged in the 1500s to describe anything that twists or coils into loops. The same Germanic root that gave Dutch krul also lies behind words for crimping and twisting in related languages. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling rarely causes trouble for adults.

How the word is built

• curl (to twist into rings)
• -y (adjective suffix, having the quality of)