Pest

How to spell pest

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pest

What does pest mean?

1. nounAn insect or animal that damages crops, food, or property.
2. nounAn annoying or persistently troublesome person.

Pest in a sentence

• The farmer sprayed the field to control every pest that threatened the harvest.

• The younger brother was a real pest whenever the older ones tried to study.

• A single pest can multiply quickly and ruin a stored bag of flour.

• The customer became such a pest that the staff dreaded his daily visits.

Where does pest come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin pestis, which literally meant a plague, a deadly epidemic, or any source of ruin and destruction. English picked it up in the late 1500s, partly through the French peste, and at first it carried that heavy original sense of a fatal contagious disease; in old documents 'the pest' simply meant the plague itself. Over the following centuries the meaning softened and broadened, moving from deadly sickness to any creature, insect, or person that brings harm or annoyance. The same Latin root survives in the more formal words 'pestilence' and 'pesticide', both of which keep the idea of something destructive. The short, blunt spelling rarely trips writers, since the four letters match the sound exactly with no silent or doubled letters to forget.

How the word is built

• pest (from Latin pestis: plague, deadly disease)