Turtle

How to spell turtle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce turtle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does turtle mean?

1. nounA slow-moving reptile with a bony or leathery shell that protects its body.

Turtle in a sentence

• The children watched a turtle glide across the aquarium glass.

• A sea turtle hauled itself onto the warm sand to lay eggs.

Where does turtle come from?

Language of origin: French

Turtle entered English in the 1650s as a sailors' word for the sea reptile, and it is essentially the French word tortue (the same root that gives us tortoise) reshaped by English mouths and ears. The French tortue traces back to a late Latin form, tortuca, which some scholars connect to tortus, meaning 'twisted' or 'crooked', perhaps describing the creature's bent limbs. English speakers folded the unfamiliar tortue into the familiar shape of an existing English bird name, turtle, which meant the turtledove and came from Latin turtur, an imitation of the bird's cooing call. So two quite different animals, a reptile and a dove, ended up sharing one spelling by pure coincidence of sound. That tidy -tle ending is the trap worth remembering: it mirrors common English words like little and bottle rather than the French -tue it came from.

How the word is built

• turtle (whole word; no productive prefix or suffix, from French tortue)