Cannibal

How to spell cannibal

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cannibal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cannibal mean?

1. nounA person or animal that eats the flesh of its own kind.

Cannibal in a sentence

• The biologist explained that the praying mantis is a cannibal that sometimes eats its mate.

• Under stress, some hamster species will turn cannibal and eat their young.

Where does cannibal come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes from Spanish Canibales, which was a variant of Caribes, the name Spanish explorers gave to the Carib people of the West Indies. When Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in the 1490s, he and later Spanish writers reported (rightly or wrongly) that some of these islanders ate human flesh, and the people's name became attached to the practice itself. The shift from r to n in Caribes to Canibales may have arisen from local pronunciation or from a confused association with the Latin canis, meaning 'dog', as if the people were savage. English borrowed the term in the second half of the 1500s, and from the same root we also get the place name 'Caribbean'. The spelling trap is the doubled n followed by a single l and the unstressed second and third vowels, which both reduce to a faint schwa and tempt writers toward 'cannibel' or 'canibal'.

How the word is built

• cannibal (from Spanish Canibales, a variant of Caribes, the name of the Carib people); not a compound, the whole word derives from that single ethnic name