Bikini

How to spell bikini

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce bikini

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bikini mean?

1. nounA two-piece swimsuit for women consisting of a bra top and a brief lower section.

Bikini in a sentence

• She packed a bikini and a sun hat for the beach holiday.

• The boutique displayed a striped bikini in the front window.

Where does bikini come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is one of the rare cases where a fashion item is named after a nuclear test site. In July 1946 the United States detonated atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll, a ring of coral islands in the Marshall Islands whose Marshallese name, Pikinni, combines 'pik' meaning surface and 'ni' meaning coconut. Only days later the French engineer and designer Louis Reard unveiled a daringly skimpy two-piece swimsuit, and he named it 'bikini', joking that its arrival would cause an explosion as shocking as the bomb tests then dominating the news. English adopted the French coinage almost immediately, and because the word is a borrowed proper name rather than a built-up Latin or Greek form, it has no prefix or suffix to puzzle over. The clean spelling, just three light syllables, is the reason it travels so easily across languages and rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• bikini (from Bikini Atoll, a Marshallese place name; treated as a single unanalysable root in English)