Thistle

How to spell thistle

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thistle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thistle mean?

1. nounA wild plant with prickly leaves and stems and usually a purple flower head.

Thistle in a sentence

• A single thistle had taken root in the middle of the lawn.

• The gardener pulled on thick gloves before grasping the thistle.

Where does thistle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Thistle comes straight from the Old English þistel, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the prickly, purple-flowered plant that has always grown wild across northern Europe. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse þistill, Dutch distel, and German Distel, all naming the same spiny weed, which suggests the word is genuinely ancient and was never borrowed from elsewhere. The spelling has barely changed in spirit for over a thousand years, although the modern arrangement of letters hides one trap: the 't' in the middle is silent, so the cluster 'stle' is pronounced 'sul', much as in 'whistle' and 'castle'. That silent 't' is exactly what makes the word easy to under-spell. The thistle later took on national fame as the emblem of Scotland, a status it has held since at least the late medieval period.

How the word is built

• thistl- (from Old English þistel: the prickly plant)
• silent -e