Cheetah

How to spell cheetah

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheetah

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheetah mean?

1. nounA large, slender spotted wild cat of Africa and parts of Asia, famous as the fastest land animal.

Cheetah in a sentence

• The documentary tracked a single cheetah across the open savannah.

• A cheetah can reach its top speed in only a few seconds.

Where does cheetah come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

The word comes from the Hindi cita, which named the spotted cat, and that in turn traces back to the Sanskrit citraka or citra, meaning 'speckled', 'bright', or 'variegated'. The underlying idea was an animal marked with distinctive spots, so the name literally celebrates the cat's dappled coat. English picked the word up in the early 1700s during the era of British contact with India, where trained cheetahs were sometimes kept and used for hunting. The same Sanskrit notion of bright, patterned colour also surfaces in other Indian words for things that are vividly marked. For the speller, the trap is that the everyday-looking 'ee' sound is followed by an unstressed '-ah' ending rather than the more familiar '-er' or '-a', a spelling that preserves its South Asian origin.

How the word is built

• cheetah (single root borrowed whole from Hindi cita; no English prefix or suffix)