Salmon

How to spell salmon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce salmon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salmon mean?

1. nounA large pink-fleshed fish that lives in the sea but swims up rivers to spawn, prized as food.
2. nounA pale pinkish-orange colour resembling the flesh of the fish.

Salmon in a sentence

• The recipe calls for a fillet of fresh salmon baked with lemon.

• She painted the bedroom walls a soft salmon that warmed in the evening light.

• Every autumn the salmon struggle upstream to reach their spawning grounds.

• The bridesmaids wore dresses in a muted shade of salmon.

Where does salmon come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Salmon comes from the Latin salmo, salmonis, the Romans' name for the large pink-fleshed river fish, a word some ancient writers linked to salire, meaning 'to leap', a nod to the way the fish hurls itself up waterfalls to spawn. English did not take it straight from Latin, however; it arrived through Anglo-Norman and Old French as saumon, and was spelled that way, with no 'l', when it entered Middle English in the 1200s. During the Renaissance, scholars who admired classical learning deliberately reinserted the 'l' into the spelling to make the word look more like its Latin parent, even though nobody had ever pronounced it. That tidy bit of educated tinkering is exactly why the modern word carries a silent 'l' that trips up writers who spell by ear. The same impulse, restoring a Latin letter into a French-derived word, also gave us the silent letters in 'doubt' and 'receipt'.

How the word is built

• salmon (a single root from Latin salmo: 'leaping fish'); the silent 'l' was inserted later to mirror the Latin spelling