Pod

How to spell pod

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pod

What does pod mean?

1. nounThe elongated casing of certain plants, such as peas or beans, that holds the seeds.
2. nounA small social group of whales, dolphins, or seals.
3. nounA small, self-contained capsule or detachable compartment.

Pod in a sentence

• She split the pea pod open and tipped the seeds into the bowl.

• A pod of dolphins followed the boat for nearly an hour.

• The airport had a quiet sleep pod where travellers could rest between flights.

• Each pod on the bean plant held about six seeds.

• The researchers tracked one pod of orcas along the coast all summer.

• The coffee machine takes a single pod for each cup.

Where does pod come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origin of pod is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge on it. It appears in English in the late 1600s meaning the seed case of a plant such as a pea or bean, the long casing that splits open to release the seeds inside. One plausible thread links it to an earlier dialect word 'podware' or 'pulse-ware', referring to leguminous crops, where 'pod' became the casing itself; another possibility connects it to 'cod', an old English word that also meant a husk, bag, or pouch (the same 'cod' that survives in 'codpiece'). From the botanical sense the word stretched outward over the centuries: by the 1800s it named a small social group of whales or seals, and in the modern age it has been borrowed for any small, self-contained capsule or compartment, such as an escape pod or a sleep pod. Because no single ancestor is firmly documented, the safest summary is that pod is a homely English word of obscure beginnings whose spelling has stayed reassuringly simple.

How the word is built

• pod (single root; no prefix or suffix)