Pet

How to spell pet

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pet

What does pet mean?

1. nounA tame animal kept at home for companionship rather than for work or food.
2. verbTo stroke or pat an animal gently and affectionately.
3. adjectiveFavourite or particularly cherished, as in a project, theory, or subject.

Pet in a sentence

• noun

  The family adopted a rescue dog as their first pet.

• verb

  The children lined up to pet the rabbits at the open farm.

• adjective

  Reducing waste in the office is the manager's pet project this year.

• noun

  Most rental flats in the city do not allow any pet in the lease.

• verb

  Always ask the owner before you pet an unfamiliar dog.

• adjective

  Poor punctuation is one of her pet peeves at work.

Where does pet come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

Pet first appears in writing in the early 1500s in Scotland and northern England, where it described a hand-reared lamb or other young animal raised by hand rather than by its mother. From there the meaning broadened to any tame animal kept for companionship, and then to a person treated as a favourite or darling. The ultimate source is genuinely uncertain: many scholars link it to Scottish Gaelic and Irish 'peata', meaning a tame or pampered animal, while others connect it to the same root that gives 'petty' (from French 'petit', meaning small), since pets were often the small or young creatures of a household. Because the spelling is so short and phonetic, the word carries no real trap; it is the history rather than the letters that is the curiosity. The affectionate adjective use, as in a 'pet name' or a 'pet project', grew naturally out of the idea of something specially favoured.

How the word is built

• pet (single root, no affixes)