Antelope

How to spell antelope

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce antelope

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does antelope mean?

1. nounA swift, slender hoofed mammal with horns, found mainly across the grasslands of Africa and Asia.

Antelope in a sentence

• The documentary followed a single antelope across the open plains.

• A startled antelope can outrun almost every predator on the savannah.

Where does antelope come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Antelope traces back through Old French antelop to the Medieval Latin anthalopus, which in turn rendered a Late Greek word antholops. In medieval and Byzantine writings this name belonged not to a real grazing animal but to a fierce fabulous beast said to haunt the banks of the river Euphrates, a creature with long saw-edged horns that could cut down trees. The exact meaning of the original Greek form is genuinely obscure, and scholars have never agreed on what its parts literally signified, so any tidy gloss would be guesswork. Only later, around the early 1600s, did English speakers transfer the legendary name to the swift, horned plains animals that explorers were reporting from Africa and Asia. Because the word entered English as a fixed borrowing rather than a built-up native compound, its spelling simply has to be memorised; the tricky middle, the unstressed '-te-' followed by '-lope', echoes the ending of 'envelope', which can help fix it in memory.

How the word is built

• Single root borrowed whole; not built from English prefixes or suffixes, though the ending resembles the common -lope sequence (compare 'envelope').