Gill

How to spell gill

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gill

What does gill mean?

1. nounThe organ through which a fish or other aquatic animal extracts oxygen from water.

Gill in a sentence

• The diseased trout had a pale, swollen gill on each side of its head.

• A crab uses a feathery gill tucked beneath its shell to breathe.

Where does gill come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

In its most familiar sense, the breathing organ of a fish, gill is a word of Scandinavian origin that reached English in the medieval period, related to Old Norse forms tied to the jaw and mouth and to similar words across the northern Germanic languages meaning the throat or jaws. By the 1300s it described the feathery slits through which fish and other water creatures draw oxygen from water. A quite separate gill, meaning a quarter of a pint, came into English from Old French gille, the name of a measuring vessel, which traces back to Late Latin gillo or gello, a cooling jar for liquids; this measuring sense is pronounced to rhyme with 'pill' becoming 'jill', a quirk that surprises many readers. A third gill, common in northern England, names a narrow rocky stream or wooded ravine and comes from Old Norse gil, meaning a ravine or cleft. The three meanings look identical on the page yet carry distinct histories, which is exactly why the short, plain spelling hides so much.

How the word is built

• gill (single root; no prefix or suffix)