Reptile

How to spell reptile

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce reptile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reptile mean?

1. nounA cold-blooded, scaly vertebrate such as a snake, lizard, turtle, or crocodile.
2. nounA treacherous, mean, or contemptible person.

Reptile in a sentence

• The zoo keeps every reptile in a heated glass enclosure.

• The landlord behaved like a reptile, evicting families without warning.

• A crocodile is the largest reptile found in those rivers.

• Colleagues called him a reptile after he leaked their plans for his own gain.

Where does reptile come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin reptilis, meaning 'creeping' or 'crawling', which was formed from the verb repere, 'to crawl'. In late Latin reptile became a noun for any creeping creature, and English took it over in the early 1300s, originally describing all manner of low, crawling animals rather than the modern scientific class. Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did naturalists narrow it to the cold-blooded, scaly vertebrates, the snakes, lizards, turtles, and crocodiles we mean today. The same Latin repere lies behind the medical word for crawling growth and the literary 'reptant', and that idea of low, slithering movement is exactly why 'reptile' came to double as an insult for a contemptible, sneaky person. The spelling keeps the Latin -ile ending intact, which is the part writers must remember rather than the more phonetic '-il' or '-al'.

How the word is built

• rept- (from Latin repere: to crawl, creep)
• -ile (adjective/noun suffix meaning 'tending to')