Tortoise

How to spell tortoise

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tortoise

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tortoise mean?

1. nounA slow-moving, land-dwelling reptile with a hard protective shell.

Tortoise in a sentence

• The tortoise withdrew its head into its shell when we approached.

• Our pet tortoise spends the winter hibernating in a box of straw.

Where does tortoise come from?

Language of origin: French

Tortoise reached English through Old French tortue, which came from the Medieval Latin tortuca, a name for the slow shelled reptile. The deeper origin is debated: many trace it to the Late Latin tartaruchus, meaning 'of Tartarus' or 'of the underworld', a label reflecting an old belief that such creatures were creatures of darkness or evil. Another strand connects the form to Latin tortus, meaning 'twisted', perhaps describing the animal's bent or crooked legs. The word entered English in the 1400s as 'tortuce' or 'tortuse', and over time the ending drifted toward the odd -oise spelling under French influence, even though it is simply pronounced as a soft 'tuss'. That mismatch between the look of '-oise' and the sound '-us' is exactly what makes the word so easy to misspell.

How the word is built

• tortoise (single root, no separable affixes); the tricky ending -oise is a frozen French-influenced spelling, not a meaningful suffix