escargot

noun

es·​car·​got ˌe-ˌskär-ˈgō 

plural escargots ˌe-ˌskär-ˈgō(z) 

: a snail prepared for use as food

Examples of escargot in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Elsewhere on the podcast, over a dinner of escargot in London, Ferguson and Leith talked about her incredible life before TV: growing up during apartheid in South Africa; falling in love with her mother's best friend's husband; and becoming a celebrated chef, novelist, and memoirist. —EW.com, 1 Sep. 2025

For hors d'oeuvres, highlights include tuna carpaccio, French onion soup, steak tartare and the escargot and foie gras parfait that Starr loves. —Hadley Hitson, The Tennessean, 21 Aug. 2025

Timeless French dishes like duck a l'orange and escargot made the menu, along with fine dining options like filet mignon topped with truffle and foie gras. —Kathleen Wong, USA Today, 10 Aug. 2025

Each immersive $350 experience concludes on the beach, where Peterson shucks oysters and transforms slipper limpets into a gourmet delicacy with a blowtorch and herb butter, reminiscent of escargot. —Pamela McLoughlin, Hartford Courant, 1 Aug. 2025

Word History

Etymology

borrowed from French, "snail," going back to Middle French escargol, borrowed from an Old Occitan antecedent of Occitan (17th-century Toulouse) escaragol, (Marseille) escaragóou, (Béarn) escargolh, alteration (perhaps by association with Old Occitan escaravat "scarab beetle" and other descendants of Latin scarabaeus scarab) of Old Occitan carcol "spiral staircase," Occitan (Rhône mouth) kalagou, karagǫu "snail," with parallel forms in Ibero-Romance (Spanish caracol "snail, gastropod, shell of a gastropod, caracole", Portuguese caracol "snail, gastropod," Galician caracó, Catalan caragol "gastropod, something with a spiral shape, helix"), of uncertain origin

Note: The Occitan forms can be explained as metathetic variants of kakaláw "snail, empty nutshell" (Bas-Dauphiné, i.e., western Dauphiné), cacaláou "snail" (Provence), cagarol (Béziers), apparently based on *cocŭlia "shell of a mollusk, nut or egg" blended with another word (see cockle entry 2). However, there is no counterpart to the unmetathesized words in Ibero-Romance, so one would have to accept that caracol, etc., were loanwords from Occitan, a somewhat unusual migration given that this sort of expressive vocabulary would more likely be native and perhaps substratal. It has been hypothesized that the word with which *cocŭlia has been blended is Greek káchlēx "shingle, gravel in a riverbed," though this word has otherwise apparently left no other trace in Romance. Another suggestion is an expressive and/or pre-Romance element *cacar- "shell of a mollusk," an extension of a root *cac(c)-/*coc(c)-, or perhaps more likely *car- "shell." (See J. Hubschmid, "Die Stämme *kar(r)- und *kurr- im Iberoromanischen, Baskischen und Inselkeltischen," Romance Philology, vol. 13, no. 1 [August, 1959], p. 39; J. Coromines, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, s.v. caracol.)

First Known Use

circa 1892, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for escargot

• nontarget
• argot
• target

Kids Definition

escargot

noun

es·​car·​got ˌes-ˌkär-ˈgō 

plural escargots -ˈgō(z) 

: a snail prepared for use as food