Roach

How to spell roach

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce roach

What does roach mean?

1. nounA cockroach, the flat brown household insect, usually referred to by this shortened name.
2. nounA small silvery European freshwater fish of the carp family, popular with anglers.

Roach in a sentence

• The tenant found a roach scuttling behind the fridge.

• The angler landed a plump roach from the slow-moving canal.

• The restaurant failed inspection after a single roach was spotted in the kitchen.

• The river holds plenty of roach near the reed beds.

Where does roach come from?

Language of origin: French

The word actually braids together two separate stories that happen to share a spelling. The oldest English roach is a name for a silvery European freshwater fish, recorded from around the 1300s and taken from the Old French roche (also roce), of obscure earlier origin. Quite separately, the insect roach is a nineteenth-century American shortening of cockroach, which English borrowed in the early 1600s from the Spanish cucaracha, the everyday word for that scuttling pest; English speakers reshaped the unfamiliar Spanish ending into the familiar-looking cock and roach, and later trimmed it back down. The much newer slang roach, meaning the stub of a hand-rolled cannabis cigarette, grew up in twentieth-century American usage, probably by jokey comparison with the small dark insect. The plain oa spelling is what unites these unrelated senses, since each settled on the same convenient four-letter shape.

How the word is built

• roach (single root; the insect sense is a clipped form of cockroach)