Canadian

How to spell canadian

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce canadian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does canadian mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Canada, its people, or its culture.
2. nounA person who is a citizen of or native to Canada.

Canadian in a sentence

• adjective

  The canadian winter often brings heavy snow to the prairies.

• noun

  As a proud canadian, he cheers loudly for the national hockey team.

• adjective

  She carries a canadian passport and votes in federal elections there.

• noun

  Every canadian at the conference spoke warmly about life in Toronto.

Where does canadian come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word builds on the place name Canada with the suffix -ian, which English borrowed from Latin -ianus to mean 'belonging to' or 'native of'. Canada itself goes back to the Iroquoian word kanata, which simply meant 'village' or 'settlement'. According to the long-standing account, when the explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St Lawrence in the 1530s, local people used kanata to point him toward their settlement, and the French took it as the name of the whole region. By the 1700s English writers were forming Canadian from it to describe the land and its people. The spelling trap lives in the middle: it is a single 'n' and a single 'd', and the stress falls on the second syllable, ca-NAY-dian, even though the base word Canada stresses the first.

How the word is built

• Canada (place name)
• -ian (suffix meaning 'belonging to' or 'a person from')