Necklace

How to spell necklace

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce necklace

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does necklace mean?

1. nounA piece of jewellery worn around the neck, such as a chain, string of beads, or pendant.

Necklace in a sentence

• She fastened the gold necklace before the dinner party.

• The pearl necklace had belonged to his grandmother.

Where does necklace come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound joining two older words, neck and lace, recorded together from around the late 1500s. The first part, neck, descends from the Old English hnecca, a Germanic word for the part of the body joining the head to the shoulders. The second part, lace, looks like the modern shoelace word, but it arrived through Old French las, meaning a cord, string, or tie, which in turn came from the Latin laqueus, literally a noose or snare. So a necklace was originally just a cord worn about the neck, and the spelling preserves that older sense of lace as a binding string rather than the decorative fabric we now picture. The trap for writers is the ending: it is spelled lace, exactly like the cord, even though the second syllable is reduced to a faint, unstressed sound in speech.

How the word is built

• neck (the part of the body)
• lace (cord or band, from Old French las)