Guerrilla

How to spell guerrilla

9 letters · 3 syllables

24 of the 25 people asked to spell guerrilla in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce guerrilla

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does guerrilla mean?

1. nounA member of a small independent armed group that fights a larger regular force using ambushes and raids.
2. adjectiveRelating to irregular, unconventional tactics, whether in actual fighting or, by extension, in business and advertising.

Guerrilla in a sentence

• noun

  The rebel guerrilla moved through the hills under cover of darkness.

• adjective

  The company ran a guerrilla marketing campaign with chalk slogans on city pavements.

• noun

  A captured guerrilla refused to reveal the location of the camp.

• adjective

  The insurgents waged a long guerrilla war against the occupying army.

Where does guerrilla come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes straight from Spanish, where guerrilla is the diminutive of guerra, meaning 'war', so the literal sense is 'little war'. The Spanish guerra itself traces back to a Germanic word werra, meaning 'strife' or 'discord', the same ancient root that gives English its plain word 'war'. English picked guerrilla up during the Peninsular War of the early 1800s, when Spanish and Portuguese irregulars harried Napoleon's armies with hit-and-run raids; British soldiers and writers described this kind of fighting using the Spanish term. Strictly, in Spanish the word meant the small-scale style of warfare rather than the fighter, but in English it quickly came to label the irregular combatant as well. The double r and the doubled l, plus the silent u after the g, are all pure Spanish spelling, and they are exactly what trips up English writers, who also have to keep it distinct from the unrelated animal 'gorilla'.

How the word is built

• guerr- (from Spanish guerra: war)
• -illa (Spanish diminutive: little)

Words that sound like guerrilla

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• gorilla: A large, powerfully built ground-dwelling ape native to the forests of central Africa.

People who misspell guerrilla also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got guerrilla wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• idiosyncrasy 87% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 50% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 46% of them got it wrong