Innocuous

How to spell innocuous

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce innocuous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does innocuous mean?

1. adjectiveNot harmful or offensive; unlikely to cause injury, upset, or controversy.

Innocuous in a sentence

• The email looked innocuous until the lawyers examined the attachment.

• What began as an innocuous remark sparked a heated argument at dinner.

Where does innocuous come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin innocuus, meaning 'harmless' or 'doing no injury', which was built from the prefix in- ('not') and the verb nocere, 'to harm or hurt'. The root nocere is a busy one in English: it also gave us 'noxious' (harmful), 'obnoxious' (offensively unpleasant) and even 'nuisance', while the closely related 'innocent' shares the very same in- plus noc- structure, originally describing someone who does no wrong. English adopted innocuous in the early seventeenth century, keeping the Latin spelling almost intact. The spelling trap lives in that middle: the doubled n at the front mirrors the in- plus a root that itself begins with n, and the unfamiliar -ocuous string is easy to muddle. Remembering the harm-bearing cousin 'noxious' helps fix the c and the o that sit at the heart of the word.

How the word is built

• in- (not)
• noc (harm, from Latin nocere 'to harm')
• -uous (adjective suffix)