Goose

How to spell goose

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce goose

What does goose mean?

1. nounA large waterbird with a long neck and webbed feet, related to the duck and swan.
2. verbTo poke someone sharply, or to give something a sudden push to increase its activity or output.

Goose in a sentence

• noun

  A single goose wandered across the village green near the pond.

• verb

  The manager wanted to goose sales with a quick weekend promotion.

• noun

  The farm sold goose eggs alongside its usual hen eggs.

• verb

  A small tax cut might goose consumer spending before the holidays.

Where does goose come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a genuinely ancient native word, descending from the Old English gos, which already meant the large waterbird we know today. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in the Dutch gans and the German Gans, and it traces all the way back to a Proto-Indo-European root that linguists reconstruct as ghans, thought to imitate the bird's honking cry. That same root surfaces in the Latin anser and even, distantly, in the Sanskrit hamsa for a goose or swan. The unusual plural geese comes from an old Germanic sound change, where a vowel was pulled forward by an ending that later vanished, the same process that turns foot into feet and tooth into teeth. The spelling trap is simply the double o, which represents a long oo sound rather than the short o that the single letter once carried.

How the word is built

• goose (single root, from Old English gos; no prefix or suffix)