Robin

How to spell robin

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce robin

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does robin mean?

1. nounA small songbird with a distinctive red or orange breast, common in gardens.

Robin in a sentence

• A robin was pulling a worm from the wet lawn.

• Every winter a robin perches on the same fence post.

Where does robin come from?

Language of origin: French

The bird's name comes from the personal name Robin, which was a familiar pet form of Robert, itself brought into English from Old French after the Norman Conquest. The Old French Robin was a diminutive of Robert, a Germanic name built from the elements hrod, meaning 'fame', and beraht, meaning 'bright'. By the sixteenth century English speakers had a fondness for giving common birds homely human names, and the small red-breasted bird was first called 'robin redbreast' before the name was simply shortened to robin. This is the same affectionate naming habit that gave us 'jenny wren' and 'jackdaw'. Because the word is just an ordinary first name in spelling, with a single b and a plain -in ending, it carries none of the silent-letter traps that trouble many bird names; the only thing to watch is resisting the urge to double the b.

How the word is built

• robin (a pet form of the personal name Robert, applied as an affectionate name for the bird)