Frog

How to spell frog

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce frog

What does frog mean?

1. nounA small, smooth-skinned, tailless amphibian with long back legs built for leaping and swimming.
2. nounAn ornamental looped fastening of braid or cord used to close a coat or jacket.

Frog in a sentence

• A green frog sat on the lily pad in the garden pond.

• The military jacket was closed with a single black braided frog.

• The children watched a tadpole slowly turn into a frog.

• She sewed a velvet frog onto the front of the cape.

Where does frog come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Frog comes straight from Old English frogga, a native Germanic word for the small leaping amphibian, and it sits alongside the older form frosc and the related Old Norse froskr and German Frosch. The whole family appears to derive from a prehistoric Germanic root meaning roughly 'to jump' or 'to hop', which fits the animal's most obvious habit. Because it is an inherited word rather than a borrowing, its spelling stayed short and blunt, with a single consonant on each side of a single vowel. Over the centuries it picked up several transferred meanings: a hoarseness in the throat (a 'frog in the throat'), a decorative looped fastening on a coat, and the soft triangular pad in the sole of a horse's hoof. The spelling has barely changed in a thousand years, which is why this is one of the easiest English nouns to write.

How the word is built

• frog (single root, Old English frogga); no prefix or suffix