Fossil

How to spell fossil

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fossil

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fossil mean?

1. nounThe preserved remains or impression of a plant or animal from a past geological age, usually found in rock.
2. adjectiveRelating to or derived from the buried remains of ancient organisms, as in fuels formed underground over millions of years.

Fossil in a sentence

• noun

  The museum displayed a complete dinosaur fossil in the main hall.

• adjective

  The policy aims to reduce the country's reliance on fossil fuel.

• noun

  She found a small fossil embedded in the cliff face during the field trip.

• adjective

  Burning fossil fuel releases carbon that had been stored for millions of years.

Where does fossil come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin fossilis, meaning 'dug up' or 'obtained by digging', which was built on the verb fodere, 'to dig'. When the word first entered English in the sixteenth century, by way of French fossile, it meant anything that had been dug out of the ground, including minerals and curious stones, not just the petrified remains of ancient life. Over the following centuries, as natural historians began to recognise that many of these buried objects were the preserved traces of long-dead plants and animals, the meaning narrowed to its modern sense. The same digging root survives in words like 'fosse', an old term for a ditch, and helps explain why the word carries a double 's' in the middle. Knowing that the core is foss-, the dug-up part, makes the spelling far easier to fix in memory, since the ending is simply the suffix -il.

How the word is built

• foss- (from Latin fodere: to dig)
• -il (adjective/noun suffix meaning 'capable of being dug')