Parrot

How to spell parrot

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parrot

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parrot mean?

1. nounA tropical bird with a strong hooked beak and bright plumage, often able to mimic human speech.
2. verbTo repeat words or ideas mechanically, without real understanding.

Parrot in a sentence

• noun

  The pet shop kept a grey parrot near the front window.

• verb

  Junior staff tend to parrot whatever the manager says in meetings.

• noun

  Their parrot learned to whistle the doorbell tune.

• verb

  He could parrot the safety rules but never actually followed them.

Where does parrot come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the early 1500s and is generally traced to French, where 'perroquet' named the bird; an older French form 'perrot' is widely thought to be a pet form of the man's name Pierre (Peter), much as the magpie 'pie' was nicknamed 'Margot' or 'maggot-pie'. Giving familiar human names to talkative birds was a common habit, and the bright, chattering parrot, newly brought back to Europe by sailors from tropical voyages, was a natural candidate. The literal sense was simply the tropical bird with a hooked beak and vivid plumage, and by the late 1500s English had already extended it to mean a person who repeats words without understanding them. The exact route is not perfectly documented, which is why several dictionaries hedge on the name-of-Peter detail, but the French origin itself is secure. For spelling, remember the trap is the double -rr- in the middle and the single -t at the end, mirroring the simple two-syllable shape PARR-ot.

How the word is built

• parrot (a single root word; no productive prefix or suffix, with the doubled medial -rr- as the key spelling feature)