Villain

How to spell villain

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce villain

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does villain mean?

1. nounA wicked or malicious person, especially the character in a story who opposes the hero.

Villain in a sentence

• Every story needs a good villain.

• The villain in the play was very convincing.

Where does villain come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin villanus, meaning a worker or servant attached to a villa, the large country estate of a Roman landowner. English picked it up through Old French vilein during the 1200s, where it described a low-born peasant or farm labourer bound to the land. Because the medieval upper classes assumed the worst of the lower ranks, the word slid from 'a humble rustic' to 'a base, ill-mannered, and dishonourable person', and by the 1800s it settled into its modern sense of a deliberate wrongdoer or the wicked character in a story. The very same villa root survives in the everyday word 'village', which keeps the original rural connection alive. The spelling trap is the ending: it is -ain, not -an or -en, a leftover from that French vilein, and the doubled l recalls the Latin villa.

How the word is built

• villain (from Latin villanus: a farm worker tied to a country estate)
• no separable affix in modern English