Scandal

How to spell scandal

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scandal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scandal mean?

1. nounAn action or event that is widely regarded as morally wrong and that damages reputations.

Scandal in a sentence

• The accounting scandal forced three directors to resign.

• Reporters spent months investigating the funding scandal.

Where does scandal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin scandalum, which meant a trap, a stumbling block, or a cause of moral offence, itself borrowed from the Greek skandalon, the springing piece of a trap that an animal triggers. In its earliest religious use it described anything that caused a person to fall into sin or lose faith, a sense still felt in older church writing. English took it up through Old French escandle in the 1500s, and the sense gradually broadened from a spiritual snare to any disgraceful event that damages reputation. The same Greek and Latin root also produced the word 'slander', which split off through a different French line, which is why the two look and feel related. The spelling keeps the plain Latin shape, so the only real trap is the unstressed second syllable, written -dal rather than the -dle that the ear might expect.

How the word is built

• scandal (from Latin scandalum: a cause of stumbling or offence)