Sac

How to spell sac

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sac

What does sac mean?

1. nounA pouch or baglike membranous cavity in a living organism, often containing fluid or air.

Sac in a sentence

• The surgeon drained the fluid-filled sac near the joint.

• Each developing embryo is surrounded by a protective yolk sac.

Where does sac come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the biological and anatomical word for a pouch, and it comes to English through French sac, meaning 'bag', which in turn descends from the Latin saccus, a 'sack' or 'large bag'. The Latin word was itself borrowed from Greek sakkos, a coarse cloth bag made of haircloth, and the Greeks had taken it from a Semitic source, related to Hebrew saq, again meaning a bag of rough material. English absorbed sac in the eighteenth century specifically as a scientific term for a membranous pouch in a plant or animal body, such as an air sac or a yolk sac. Its blunt three-letter shape, with no final 'k', signals this technical, Latin-flavoured sense and distinguishes it from the everyday homophone 'sack', which travelled the same ancestral road but settled into ordinary speech. Remembering that sac is the lab-and-textbook spelling, while sack is the bag you carry, is the key to keeping the two apart.

How the word is built

• sac (from Latin saccus: bag, pouch); a single unanalysable root word

Words that sound like sac

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sack: A large bag made of strong material, used for carrying or storing goods.