Rodent

How to spell rodent

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rodent

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rodent mean?

1. nounA small gnawing mammal such as a mouse, rat, squirrel, or beaver, with continuously growing incisor teeth.

Rodent in a sentence

• The pest controller set traps because a rodent had been chewing the wiring in the attic.

• A squirrel is a rodent that stores nuts for the winter months.

Where does rodent come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin rodere, a verb meaning 'to gnaw' or 'to nibble away', which captured exactly what these animals do with their ever-growing front teeth. From the present participle stem rodent-, naturalists in the early 1800s built a scientific name for the order Rodentia, the gnawing mammals, and the everyday English noun 'rodent' followed soon after. The same rodere root gnaws its way into a few other English words: 'corrode' literally means to gnaw something away bit by bit, and 'erode' describes earth or rock being worn down. Remembering that the heart of the word is rod- (the gnawing root, not the schwa-sounding ending) helps fix the spelling, since the unstressed second syllable can otherwise tempt writers toward an 'a' or 'i'.

How the word is built

• rod- (from Latin rodere: to gnaw)
• -ent (noun/adjective suffix denoting an agent)