Giggles

How to spell giggles

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce giggles

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does giggles mean?

1. nounRepeated bursts of light, often uncontrollable laughter.
2. verbLaughs in a light, repeated, often nervous way (third person singular).

Giggles in a sentence

• noun

  The whispered joke gave the whole back row a fit of the giggles.

• verb

  The toddler giggles every time the puppy licks her hand.

• noun

  She got the giggles during the meeting and struggled to compose herself.

• verb

  He always giggles at the same line in that film.

Where does giggles come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word giggle is echoic, meaning it imitates the sound it names: the light, repeated, half-suppressed laughter it describes. It first appears in English in the early 1500s, formed in the same playful way as related noisy words such as 'cackle', 'chuckle', and 'snigger', all of which pair a sound-suggesting root with the frequentative ending '-le' that signals an action done over and over in quick bursts. There may be a distant kinship with the Dutch 'giggelen' and the German 'gickeln', which carry the same sense of tittering laughter, but these are best understood as parallel imitations rather than a chain of borrowing. The doubled 'g' simply preserves the short, hard vowel sound and is the small spelling point worth remembering. Over time the noun came to mean a fit of such laughter, while the form 'giggles' often names the contagious, hard-to-stop kind.

How the word is built

• gigg- (imitative root suggesting light laughter)
• -le (frequentative, denoting repeated action)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb suffix)