A scarab is a stout beetle, often dark, in the large family that includes dung beetles. The famous kind is the sacred scarab of ancient Egypt: people watched it roll a ball of dung and linked that with the sun, so they carved beetle-shaped stones as lucky charms and as seals. In English today, scarab can mean the living insect or that beetle-shaped jewel. It is a museum and nature-book word; children usually just say beetle unless they mean the Egyptian one. It came into English from French scarabée, from Latin scarabaeus, “beetle.” English once also had scarabaeus as a learned twin of the same word, but that form has dropped out.