Kennel

How to spell kennel

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kennel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kennel mean?

1. nounA small hut or shelter for a dog, or an establishment where dogs are bred or boarded.
2. verbTo keep or confine a dog in a kennel.

Kennel in a sentence

• noun

  The spaniel slept in a wooden kennel beside the back door.

• verb

  The breeder decided to kennel the hounds overnight during the storm.

• noun

  They booked the dog into a boarding kennel during the holidays.

• verb

  Farmers often kennel working dogs near the barn.

Where does kennel come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Kennel comes ultimately from the Latin word canis, meaning 'dog', which gave rise to the Vulgar Latin form canile for a place where dogs were kept. English picked it up in the early 1300s through Old North French kenil, a regional variant of the more familiar chenil. From the start it named a small shelter or hut built for a hound, and the plural 'kennels' soon came to mean an establishment that breeds or boards dogs. The same canis root sits behind 'canine' and even 'kennel club', which makes the dog connection easy to keep in mind. The spelling trap is the doubled n followed by a single l, since the word looks as though it might mirror the symmetry of other -el words but does not.

How the word is built

• kennel (from Latin canile: a place for dogs, from canis 'dog')