Bamboo

How to spell bamboo

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bamboo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bamboo mean?

1. nounA tall, fast-growing tropical grass with hollow, woody, jointed stems used for building, furniture, and crafts.

Bamboo in a sentence

• The garden centre sold tall bamboo in heavy ceramic pots.

• They laid a hard-wearing bamboo floor throughout the kitchen.

Where does bamboo come from?

Language of origin: Other

Bamboo came into English in the late 1500s, almost certainly through Dutch traders as 'bamboes', which English speakers later trimmed back to 'bamboo' by treating the final s as a plural marker. The Dutch in turn picked it up from a Malay or Kannada word, often given as 'mambu' or 'bambu', the local name for the tall woody grass that grows across South and Southeast Asia. The plant was a novelty to Europeans, prized for its strength and hollow, jointed stems, and the foreign-sounding name travelled with the imported canes. Because the word was borrowed by ear rather than from any classical root, its spelling settled mainly on phonetics, which is why the doubled o at the end is the only real point to remember. It has no relatives among the usual Latin and Greek vocabulary; it is purely an exotic import that European languages adopted whole.

How the word is built

• bamboo (single root, not built from smaller English parts)