Squirrel
nounA small, agile tree-dwelling rodent with a long bushy tail that feeds on nuts and seeds.
How to spell squirrel
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce squirrel
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does squirrel mean?
- nounA small, agile tree-dwelling rodent with a long bushy tail that feeds on nuts and seeds.
- verbTo hide or store something carefully for future use, often a little at a time.
Squirrel in a sentence
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noun
A grey squirrel darted across the garden fence at dawn.
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verb
He likes to squirrel away a small amount of his salary each month.
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noun
The bird feeder had a baffle to stop every hungry squirrel from raiding it.
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verb
They squirrel spare batteries and tinned food in the cellar.
Where does squirrel come from?
Language of origin: Greek
The word travelled into English from the Greek skiouros, a charming compound of skia, meaning 'shadow', and oura, meaning 'tail', so the animal was literally a 'shadow-tail', named for the way it shades itself beneath its own bushy tail. Greek passed it to Latin as sciurus, which in turn produced the Vulgar Latin diminutive scuriolus, a 'little squirrel'. From there it became esquirel in Anglo-Norman French, and English borrowed that form in the early 1300s. The new word gradually pushed out the native Old English name acweorna for the same creature. The spelling trap survives precisely because of that French route: the silent-ish 'qu', the doubled 'r', and the 'el' ending all reflect the foreign journey rather than the way the word actually sounds.
How the word is built
- squirrel (a single borrowed root, not built from English parts; ultimately from Greek skiouros 'shadow-tail', skia 'shadow'
- oura 'tail')
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