Pouch

How to spell pouch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pouch

What does pouch mean?

1. nounA small soft bag used to hold or carry something.
2. verbTo put or tuck something into a pouch or pocket-like space.

Pouch in a sentence

• noun

  She kept her loose change in a leather pouch.

• verb

  The hamster can pouch several seeds in its cheeks at once.

• noun

  The tablet came sealed in a padded pouch to prevent scratches.

• verb

  He would quietly pouch the spare coins rather than count them.

Where does pouch come from?

Language of origin: French

The word came into English in the 1300s from Old French pouche, a northern French variant of poche, meaning a 'bag' or 'pocket'. That French word was itself of Germanic origin, sharing an ancestor with the same root that gave English 'poke' (an old word for a sack, still heard in the phrase 'a pig in a poke') and indeed 'pocket', which is literally a 'little pouch'. The original sense was simply a soft bag for carrying coins, tobacco, or small goods, and from the 1600s naturalists extended it to the belly pocket of animals such as the kangaroo. The 'ou' spelling preserves the Old French vowel, even though the modern pronunciation sounds like a plain 'ow', which is the small trap for writers tempted to spell it 'pouwch' or 'pooch'.

How the word is built

• pouch (a small bag); a single root borrowed whole, with no prefix or suffix