Albino

How to spell albino

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce albino

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does albino mean?

1. nounA person or animal born with little or no pigment, typically having very pale skin, white hair, and pink or pale eyes.

Albino in a sentence

• The zoo's rare albino python drew large crowds all summer.

• A rare albino squirrel appeared at the bird feeder each morning.

Where does albino come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from Latin albus, meaning simply 'white', and was passed into English through Portuguese and Spanish, where albino was formed by adding the suffix -ino. Portuguese explorers along the West African coast in the sixteenth century used the term albinos for people they encountered who had unusually pale skin and hair, treating them as a distinct group; the word literally carried the sense of 'the whitish one'. From there it spread into other European languages and reached English in the late eighteenth century, where it broadened to describe any human or animal lacking normal pigment. The same Latin albus survives in everyday words such as 'album' (originally a blank white tablet) and 'albumen', the white of an egg, which helps fix the opening 'alb-' in the spelling. The trap for writers is the ending: it is -ino, the Spanish-derived suffix, not the more familiar English -ina or -eno.

How the word is built

• alb- (from Latin albus: white)
• -ino (Spanish/Portuguese diminutive and nominal suffix)