Pesticide

How to spell pesticide

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce pesticide

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pesticide mean?

1. nounA chemical substance used to kill insects, weeds, or other organisms harmful to crops or stored produce.

Pesticide in a sentence

• The farmer sprayed a pesticide across the wheat field before harvest.

• Residues of the pesticide were detected on the imported fruit.

Where does pesticide come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound built from two Latin pieces. The first half comes from pestis, which meant 'plague' or 'contagious disease', the same root that gives English 'pest' and 'pestilence'; over time 'pest' narrowed to mean any troublesome insect or organism that damages crops or stored goods. The second half, -cide, descends from the Latin verb caedere, meaning 'to cut down' or 'to kill', the same element seen in 'homicide' and 'insecticide'. The two were joined with a linking -i- to form 'pesticide', a literal 'pest-killer'. The word is a twentieth-century coinage, entering wide use in the 1930s and especially after the Second World War as synthetic chemical sprays became common in agriculture. The spelling trap lies in the middle: the unstressed second syllable sounds like a vague schwa, so writers must remember it is 'pest-i-cide', not 'pest-a-cide'.

How the word is built

• pest (harmful organism, from Latin pestis 'plague')
• -i- (connecting vowel)
• -cide (killer, from Latin caedere 'to kill')