Sickle

How to spell sickle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sickle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sickle mean?

1. nounA hand tool with a short handle and a curved blade, used for cutting grain, grass, or weeds.

Sickle in a sentence

• The farmer sharpened the sickle before cutting the wheat by hand.

• A rusty sickle hung on a nail in the old barn.

Where does sickle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Old English sicol, a curved cutting tool used for reaping grain by hand. The Anglo-Saxons borrowed it very early from the Latin secula, meaning a reaping hook, which was built on the verb secare, 'to cut'. That same Latin root for cutting lies behind a whole family of familiar English words, including 'section', 'secateurs', and 'dissect'. The curved blade gives the tool its instantly recognisable shape, and that shape is why the word later named the crescent emblem on flags and the crescent moon in poetry. The trickiest part of the spelling is the unstressed ending, which sounds like 'kul' but is written -ckle, with the silent doubling of the c into ck before the gentle -le.

How the word is built

• sicol (Old English for a reaping hook)
• -le (diminutive/instrument ending)