Crocodile
/ˈkrɑkədaɪl/noun
A large armoured reptile of tropical rivers, with a long snout and teeth visible when the jaw is shut.
The Greek roots
Literally: “shingle worm”
The story of the word
Herodotus reports that Egyptians called the animal champsai and that Ionian Greeks named it after the lizards they knew from the dry stone walls at home. The standard breakdown into κρόκη, shingle or pebbles, plus δρῖλος, worm, is old and plausible rather than proved. Middle English had it as cocodrille through French, with the consonants swapped, until sixteenth-century writers pulled the spelling back towards the Greek. Crocodile tears come from a medieval bestiary story that the beast weeps over what it eats.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
A crocodile lay on the bank so still the children thought it was carved.