Wig

How to spell wig

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wig

What does wig mean?

1. nounA covering of artificial or real hair worn on the head.

Wig in a sentence

• The actor wore a curly grey wig for his role as the judge.

• She chose a stylish wig that matched her old hair colour.

Where does wig come from?

Language of origin: French

Wig is a shortened form of 'periwig', which English writers were using in the early seventeenth century for an artificial covering of false hair. Periwig was itself an altered spelling of the older 'perwike' or 'perruke', taken from the French word 'perruque', which simply meant a head of hair or a wig. The French term may go back to an Italian word 'perrucca' of uncertain origin, so the deeper roots are genuinely murky. By around the 1670s, fashionable English speakers had clipped the long word down to the snappy single syllable 'wig', and that short form has stayed with us ever since. The shortening is why the spelling looks so simple now, with no trace of the long French original it grew out of.

How the word is built

• wig (a clipped form of 'periwig', itself an altered borrowing of French 'perruque')