Spoil

How to spell spoil

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spoil

What does spoil mean?

1. verbTo damage or ruin something so that it is no longer good or enjoyable.
2. verbOf food, to become unfit to eat through decay.
3. verbTo harm someone's character by giving them too much of what they want.

Spoil in a sentence

• A single careless comment can spoil an otherwise pleasant evening.

• Milk will spoil quickly if it is left out of the fridge.

• Grandparents love to spoil the children with sweets and gifts.

• Heavy rain threatened to spoil the outdoor wedding.

• Ripe berries tend to spoil within a couple of days.

• She decided to spoil herself with a long spa weekend.

Where does spoil come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin verb spoliare, meaning 'to strip' or 'to plunder', which was built on the noun spolium, originally the hide or skin stripped from a slain animal and later the armour or booty taken from a defeated enemy. English took it up around the year 1300 through Old French espoillier, and at first it carried that violent military sense of stripping the dead and looting a conquered town. From the idea of robbing or despoiling something of its value came the gentler modern meaning of damaging or ruining a thing, and from there the everyday sense of food going bad or of a person being overindulged into worthlessness. The plural noun 'spoils', meaning the rewards of victory, preserves the oldest plunder sense, as in the familiar saying that the winner takes the prizes. The simple spelling rarely trips adults, though the OY vowel is sometimes mistakenly written 'oy' as in 'spoyl'.

How the word is built

• spoil (a single root from Latin spoliare: to strip or plunder); no productive prefix or suffix in the modern form