Lizard

How to spell lizard

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lizard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lizard mean?

1. nounA small to medium reptile with a long body, four legs, and a tapering tail.

Lizard in a sentence

• A small lizard darted across the warm patio stones.

• The pet shop kept a lizard in a heated glass tank.

Where does lizard come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin lacerta, meaning 'lizard', a feminine noun that also doubled as the name for the muscle of the upper arm (because the rippling shape was thought to resemble the creature). English picked it up through Old French, where lacerta had softened into forms like lesard and lusarde, and Middle English speakers reshaped the ending to the more familiar '-ard' spelling seen in words such as 'mustard' and 'wizard'. The same Latin root survives elsewhere too: the muscle term 'lacertus' and the constellation Lacerta both preserve it. The tricky part for spellers is the unstressed middle, written with a 'z' that sounds soft, and the '-ard' close that is easy to slip into '-erd'. The word settled into its modern form in English around the fourteenth century.

How the word is built

• lizard (from Latin lacerta, a lizard); single root noun with no separable prefix or suffix