Kid

How to spell kid

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce kid

What does kid mean?

1. nounAn informal word for a child or young person.
2. nounA young goat.
3. verbTo tease or deceive someone in a playful way.

Kid in a sentence

• noun

  Every kid in the class received a reading certificate.

• noun

  The farmer fed the newborn kid from a bottle each morning.

• verb

  His colleagues like to kid him about his messy desk.

• noun

  The babysitter watched the kid while the parents worked late.

• noun

  A nanny goat will defend her kid from any predator.

• verb

  She did not mean to kid anyone with that exaggerated story.

Where does kid come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Kid entered English around the 1200s from a Scandinavian source, closely related to the Old Norse kid, meaning the young of a goat. For centuries it kept only that literal animal sense, naming a baby goat, and from there it also gave its name to the soft leather, kidskin, made from such young goats. The playful sense of kid meaning a child emerged much later, becoming common in informal English by the 1800s, much as we still affectionately call the young of many animals by their own names. The verb kid, meaning to tease or fool someone, also grew up in this casual period, perhaps from the idea of treating a person like a gullible youngster. The spelling is mercifully simple and phonetic, which is why the word rarely troubles writers; its interest lies in how one Norse goat-word branched into a child, a leather, and a friendly joke.

How the word is built

• kid (single root, of Old Norse origin); no prefix or suffix