Scarecrow

How to spell scarecrow

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scarecrow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scarecrow mean?

1. nounA figure dressed in old clothes and set up in a field to frighten birds away from crops.

Scarecrow in a sentence

• The farmer propped a ragged scarecrow in the middle of the wheat field.

• The children stuffed an old shirt with straw to build a scarecrow for the garden.

Where does scarecrow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, formed simply by joining the verb 'scare' to the noun 'crow', the black bird that raids newly sown fields. The verb 'scare' itself goes back to Old Norse 'skirra', meaning 'to frighten', which entered English from the Norse settlers in the medieval period, while 'crow' is a native Old English word, 'crawe', named in imitation of the bird's harsh call. Put together, the compound literally describes a figure whose job is to scare crows away from crops, and it appears in English from the 1500s. An older and now obsolete sense even used 'scarecrow' for a real person hired to chase birds off the fields before the stuffed dummy took over the role. Because both halves are common everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the spelling holds no hidden trap.

How the word is built

• scare (frighten away)
• crow (the bird)