Rooster

How to spell rooster

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rooster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rooster mean?

1. nounAn adult male domestic chicken, known for crowing at dawn.

Rooster in a sentence

• The rooster crowed loudly just as the sun came up over the farm.

• They kept one rooster and six hens in the backyard coop.

Where does rooster come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Rooster is a homegrown American word that grew out of the verb and noun 'roost', meaning a raised perch where birds settle to sleep for the night. The base 'roost' descends from Old English 'hrost', which named the wooden framework of a roof and the perch fowls used inside a building. By adding the agent suffix '-er', speakers made a word meaning literally 'one that roosts', a bird that takes to the perch. The term rose to favour in the United States during the late 1700s and early 1800s as a polite substitute for 'cock', whose other slang sense was felt to be coarse. It then spread to Canada and is widely understood in Britain too, although British speakers still lean on 'cockerel' for a young male bird. The spelling trap is the double 'o' carried straight over from 'roost', not the 'u' sound some writers expect.

How the word is built

• roost (a bird's perch)
• -er (agent noun: one that does)