Patrol

How to spell patrol

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce patrol

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does patrol mean?

1. verbTo move regularly around an area to keep watch, guard it, or maintain order.
2. nounA group of people, or the act, of moving around an area to keep watch or guard it.

Patrol in a sentence

• verb

  Two officers patrol the shopping district every evening.

• noun

  A police patrol stopped near the bridge to check the report.

• verb

  Security guards patrol the warehouse perimeter through the night.

• noun

  The night patrol covers every corridor of the hospital.

Where does patrol come from?

Language of origin: French

Patrol came into English in the seventeenth century from the French noun patrouille and its verb patrouiller, a military term for the act of going the rounds to keep watch. The French verb originally carried the down-to-earth sense of tramping or paddling through mud, and it grew from Old French patouiller, meaning to splash or dabble in water, which itself traces back to patte, the word for a paw or foot. The imagery is of soldiers slogging on foot through muck as they made their rounds, which is a useful picture for remembering that the word is about moving and watching, not standing still. English first used it for night watches and military rounds before it broadened to police and security work. The single l and the unstressed first syllable (puh-TROL) are the main spelling traps, since the foot-slogging origin gives no hint of a doubled letter.

How the word is built

• patrol (from French patrouiller, to tramp through mud); no separable affixes in English