Scandalous

How to spell scandalous

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce scandalous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scandalous mean?

1. adjectiveCausing public outrage or moral offence; shamefully improper.

Scandalous in a sentence

• The report exposed a scandalous misuse of company funds.

• The politician resigned after a scandalous affair came to light.

Where does scandalous come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek skandalon, which literally meant a trap or a snare, and more specifically the springing stick of a trap that an animal trips over. Greek-speaking writers extended that physical image into a moral one, so skandalon came to mean a stumbling block, something that trips a person into wrongdoing or causes offence. Latin took it in as scandalum with the same moral sense, and Old French reshaped it into scandale and the adjective scandaleux. English borrowed the adjective in the late 1500s as scandalous, meaning shameful or shocking to public decency. The hidden trap for spellers is the soft, unstressed middle: the -dal- sounds like a vague schwa, which tempts writers toward -dle- or -dol-, even though the ending is the regular -ous suffix.

How the word is built

• scandal- (from Latin scandalum: a cause of offence or moral stumbling)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of, characterised by)