Dagger

How to spell dagger

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dagger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dagger mean?

1. nounA short knife with a pointed, usually double-edged blade, made for stabbing.
2. nounA printed cross-shaped mark used to flag a footnote or to indicate that a person has died.

Dagger in a sentence

• The museum displayed a jewelled dagger beside the medieval armour.

• The editor placed a dagger after the heading to point readers to a second footnote.

• The actor drew a stage dagger during the duel scene.

• In the family record a small dagger beside each name marked the year of death.

Where does dagger come from?

Language of origin: French

Dagger appears in English in the late 1300s, and its exact parentage is genuinely uncertain. The most likely source is the Old French word 'dague', meaning a short stabbing blade, which itself relates to forms found across medieval Europe such as Italian 'daga' and Spanish 'daga'. English seems to have taken the French noun and added the homely '-er' ending, perhaps by association with a now lost verb meaning to pierce or stab. An even earlier Latin word 'daca' may lie behind the whole family, possibly naming a knife of the Dacians, a people of the lower Danube, though scholars cannot prove this. The spelling trap is the doubled 'g', which keeps the vowel short and stops the word being read like 'dager'. Because the early history is murky, the origin is best described as French with deeper roots that remain debated.

How the word is built

• dagger (single root; no productive prefix or suffix, doubled g preserves the short 'a')