Banana

How to spell banana

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce banana

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does banana mean?

1. nounA long curved tropical fruit with soft sweet flesh and a yellow skin.

Banana in a sentence

• He packed a banana in his lunch every morning.

• The recipe calls for one ripe banana mashed into the batter.

Where does banana come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word arrived in English in the late sixteenth century through Spanish and Portuguese traders who encountered the fruit in West Africa. Both languages took it from a West African source, most likely Wolof or a related Mandé language spoken along the Guinea coast, where a similar word named the fruit. English writers of the time recorded forms such as 'bonana' before the spelling settled on its modern shape. The repeated 'an' syllables are exactly what trip people up, since the hand wants to keep going and add one 'an' too many or too few. Interestingly, the botanical genus name Musa is unrelated and comes from a different scholarly tradition, so the everyday English word kept its African-via-Iberian roots. That origin in spoken trade rather than written Latin is why the spelling looks so plain yet feels surprisingly easy to overshoot.

How the word is built

• banana (a single unanalysable root; no prefix or suffix, just the doubled pattern of a-n-a-n-a after the opening b)