cavil

Other forms of cavil

plural

cavils·

past tense or participle

cavilled

present participle

cavilling

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about cavil

What does cavil mean?

cavil means "an evasion of the point of an argument by raising irrelevant distinctions or objections". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cavil?

cavil has 2 syllables: ca-vil. The stress falls on "ca".

What is another word for cavil?

Close synonyms include quibble, quiddity, carp, chicane. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is cavil a common word?

cavil is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.