Queue

How to spell queue

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce queue

What does queue mean?

1. nounA line of people or vehicles waiting their turn for something.
2. verbTo wait in a line, or to arrange items in order for later processing.

Queue in a sentence

• noun

  We waited in a long queue.

• verb

  Shoppers had to queue for over an hour on the first day of the sale.

• noun

  There's always a long queue at the bakery.

• verb

  The software lets you queue several files for download overnight.

Where does queue come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French queue, meaning 'tail', which itself traces back to the Latin cauda, also 'tail'. In English it was first used in the 1500s in heraldry to describe the tail of an animal on a coat of arms. By the 1700s it had come to mean a long plait of hair worn hanging down the back, which resembled a tail. The familiar modern sense, a line of people or vehicles waiting their turn, developed in the early 1800s, and it remains far more common in British than American usage. The curious string of vowels at the end, 'ueue', preserves the French form intact, which is exactly why the word is so often misspelled: only the first letter is sounded, and the rest trails silently like the tail it once named.

How the word is built

• queue (from French queue: tail), one root with no prefix or suffix; note the silent 'ueue' tail that gives the word its spelling trap

Words that sound like queue

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• cue: A signal, word, or action that prompts someone to do or say something.