Bayou

How to spell bayou

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bayou

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bayou mean?

1. nounA slow-moving, marshy outlet or backwater of a river or lake, especially in the southern United States.

Bayou in a sentence

• The fishing guide steered the flat boat through the murky bayou.

• Alligators sunned themselves on the muddy bank of the bayou.

Where does bayou come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word entered English in the early 1700s through the French spoken by settlers in Louisiana, who borrowed it from the Choctaw word bayuk, meaning a small stream or creek. The Choctaw and other native peoples of the lower Mississippi used the term for the slow, swampy waterways that branch off the main rivers, and French colonists adapted both the sound and the idea, spelling it bayou. From Louisiana the word spread into wider American English as the standard name for a marshy, sluggish backwater. The unusual look of the word, with its vowel-heavy ending oou, is a direct fossil of that French respelling of a native sound, which is exactly why it trips up writers who expect a more familiar English pattern. Because it names a feature of the American South, bayou stayed close to its Gulf Coast home for a long time before becoming familiar everywhere through music, fiction, and film.

How the word is built

• bayou (a single root borrowed whole; no prefix or suffix, from Choctaw bayuk meaning small stream)