Word of the day · Friday, October 30, 2026

cavy

noun

Any of a family of short-tailed South American rodents. The guinea pig is the best known.

Where it comes from

From the modern Latin genus name Cavia, from Galibi cabiai, a word from a Carib language of northern South America.

Worth knowing

Guinea pigs are neither pigs nor from Guinea. They were domesticated in the Andes thousands of years ago, and one theory says the name came from the ships that brought them to Europe by way of West Africa.

By the letters

• 4letters
• 1vowels (A E I O U)
• V, Yuncommon letters
• 4different letters

Playing it

CAVY gets V and Y into four letters with one vowel. CAVIES is the plural, which needs the Y swapped for IES.

One letter away

Words you get by changing a single letter, the steps of a word ladder.

• cagy
• caky
• cany
• cava
• cave
• davy
• navy
• wavy

In Unsaid

CAVY was word of the day number 12 in Unsaid, a falling-letter word game where every player gets the same word on the same date. As a word it scores 290 points. Under the current rules, spelling it as the word of the day is worth a bonus of 8,580 reading down or 6,435 reading across, before any streak. How the bonus works.