Pelican

How to spell pelican

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pelican

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pelican mean?

1. nounA large water bird with a long bill and a stretchy throat pouch used to scoop up fish.

Pelican in a sentence

• A pelican glided low over the harbour before diving for fish.

• The wildlife park keeps one pelican in the large lakeside enclosure.

Where does pelican come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek pelekan, the name for a large water bird, and it is widely thought to be connected to the Greek pelekys, meaning 'axe', a nod to the bird's broad, chopping bill. The Greek name passed into Late Latin as pelicanus, and from there it reached Old English as pellican well before the Norman Conquest. For centuries medieval writers loved the bird because of a legend that the mother pelican pierced her own breast to feed her young with blood, which made it a popular symbol in religious art. The single-l spelling we use today settled over time, even though the Latin and Old English forms once carried a double l. The trap for modern writers is precisely that quietness: the word has one l, one c, and a soft unstressed ending, so 'pelican' is easy to over-double or to spell with a stray k.

How the word is built

• pelican (from Greek pelekan, a large water bird, perhaps linked to pelekys 'axe' for its broad bill)