Sandal
name, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A type of open shoe made up of straps or bands holding a sole to the foot
- 2 sandalwood uncountable
"And on the tables every clime and age / Jumbled together: celts and calumets, / Claymore and snow-shoe, toys in lava, fans / Of sandal, amber, ancient rosaries[…]"
- 3 A long narrow boat used on the Barbary coast.
- 4 a shoe consisting of a sole fastened by straps to the foot wordnet
- 1 To put on sandals.
- 1 A suburb of Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref SE3418).
Example
More examples"The boy lost his sandal in the field."
Etymology
From Middle English sandal (“sandal”), from Old French sandale, from Latin sandalium, from Ancient Greek σανδάλιον (sandálion), diminutive of σάνδαλον (sándalon, “sandal”), of unknown origin. Often mistakenly parsed as related to sand.
From Middle English sandal (“sandalwood”), from Medieval Latin sandalum, from Byzantine Greek σάνδανον (sándanon), σάνταλον (sántalon), from Arabic صَنْدَل (ṣandal), from Middle Persian [script needed] (cndl /čandal/, “sandalwood”), from Sanskrit चन्दन (candana, “sandalwood”). Doublet of santalum.
From Arabic صَنْدَل (ṣandal), the same word as the shoe sandal, just applied for boats of the shape of this shoe.
From Old English sand halh.
Related phrases
More for "sandal"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.