Flea

How to spell flea

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flea

What does flea mean?

1. nounA tiny wingless jumping insect that feeds on the blood of animals and people.

Flea in a sentence

• The vet found a single flea in the dog's fur.

• A flea can jump many times its own body length.

Where does flea come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flea descends from the Old English fleah or flea, the name for the small wingless biting insect, and it traces back through Proto-Germanic to roots shared with German Floh and Dutch vlo. The word is genuinely ancient and native to English, never borrowed from Latin or French, which is why it stays short and irregular in spelling. Some etymologists have linked the name loosely to an old root meaning 'to flee', on the idea of a creature that springs and escapes when you try to catch it, and that proposed link is part of why flea and its homophone flee are spelled so similarly. The famous phrase 'flea market', borrowed in the 1900s from the French marche aux puces (literally 'market of fleas', so named for the old, possibly flea-ridden goods on sale), keeps the same word alive in everyday use. The crucial spelling trap is the ending: the insect is flea with an 'a', while the verb meaning to run away is flee with two 'e' letters.

How the word is built

• flea (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like flea

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• flee: To run away quickly from danger, trouble, or an unwanted situation.