Dinosaur

How to spell dinosaur

8 letters · 3 syllables

24 of the 178 people asked to spell dinosaur in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is dinasour. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

dinasour dinosaur

What people typed instead

• dinasour6 people
• dinosour4 people

How to pronounce dinosaur

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dinosaur mean?

1. nounAny of the large extinct reptiles that dominated the land during the Mesozoic era.
2. nounA person, organisation, or thing regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned or unable to adapt.

Dinosaur in a sentence

• The museum unveiled a complete dinosaur skeleton in the main hall.

• The old mainframe computer was a dinosaur compared with the new cloud system.

• The documentary explained why every dinosaur vanished millions of years ago.

• Some critics called the broadcaster a dinosaur that refused to change with the times.

Where does dinosaur come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word was deliberately coined in 1842 by the British anatomist Richard Owen, who fused two Greek roots: deinos, meaning 'terrible' or 'fearfully great', and sauros, meaning 'lizard'. He invented it to name the giant extinct reptiles whose fossil bones were then being unearthed across England, picturing them as awesome, terrible lizards. The same sauros root sits inside many later coinages such as 'tyrannosaurus' and 'stegosaurus', which is why the spelling closes with the unexpected -saur rather than a plainer -sore. The deinos element also surfaces in the word 'dinotherium', another fossil beast. Because the term was minted from classical Greek by a scientist rather than inherited gradually, its spelling is fixed and identical across the English-speaking world. The figurative sense, an outdated person or thing left behind by progress, grew naturally in the twentieth century from the image of these long-extinct giants.

How the word is built

• dino- (from Greek deinos: terrible, fearfully great)
• saur (from Greek sauros: lizard)