Wasp

How to spell wasp

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wasp

What does wasp mean?

1. nounA slender flying insect with a narrow waist and a painful sting, often coloured black and yellow.

Wasp in a sentence

• A wasp drifted in through the open kitchen window.

• She was stung on the arm by a wasp at the picnic.

Where does wasp come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wasp is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English 'wæps' or 'wæsp', a name for the familiar stinging insect. It belongs to a wider family of Germanic words, including the Old High German 'wafsa' and the Dutch 'wesp', and beyond that it links to an even older root that probably referred to weaving, a nod to the way these insects build their papery nests. Interestingly, the Old English form often placed the 'p' before the 's' (waeps), and the two letters swapped places over time through a process called metathesis to give the modern 'wasp'. The same root also surfaces in Latin 'vespa', the word that gave the Italian motor scooter its name. Because the word has been in continuous everyday use since before the Norman Conquest, its spelling settled early and has stayed reassuringly regular.

How the word is built

• wasp (single Germanic root; no prefix or suffix)