Rabbit
nounA small, long-eared, burrowing mammal often kept as a pet or found in the wild.
How to spell rabbit
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce rabbit
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does rabbit mean?
- nounA small, long-eared, burrowing mammal often kept as a pet or found in the wild.
- verbIn British informal use, to talk at length about trivial matters.
Rabbit in a sentence
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noun
A wild rabbit darted across the field and vanished into its burrow.
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verb
He would rabbit for hours about football if nobody stopped him.
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noun
The children begged their parents for a pet rabbit with floppy ears.
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verb
She tends to rabbit away whenever the meeting drags past noon.
Where does rabbit come from?
Language of origin: French
Rabbit appears in English in the late 1300s, originally referring to the young of the animal we now simply call a rabbit, while the adult was long known as a 'coney'. The word seems to have come from Old French or a Walloon dialect form such as 'rabotte', a term for a young rabbit, though the ultimate source is uncertain and may be Dutch or another Low Countries dialect. Over time 'rabbit' edged out 'coney' as the standard name for the whole animal, partly because 'coney' had drifted into use as a vulgar pun and fell out of polite speech. The doubled b, which is the usual spelling trap, reflects the short, clipped vowel before it, a regular English pattern seen in 'rabid' versus the longer vowel words. Because the early forms varied so widely, scholars treat the precise origin as genuinely unsettled.
How the word is built
- rabbit (single root, no productive affixes; the doubled b marks the short 'a' before it)
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