Cougar

How to spell cougar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cougar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cougar mean?

1. nounA large tawny wild cat of the Americas, also known as the puma or mountain lion.
2. nounInformal term for an older woman who seeks romantic relationships with younger men.

Cougar in a sentence

• Hikers were warned that a cougar had been seen near the trail.

• The sitcom built an entire episode around a glamorous cougar and her much younger boyfriend.

• The ranger tracked the cougar across the snowy ridge for two days.

• Tabloids labelled the actress a cougar after she married a man half her age.

Where does cougar come from?

Language of origin: Other

Cougar reached English in the late 1700s from the French couguar, a name the French naturalist Buffon coined when describing the big cats of the Americas. Buffon had shortened it from an older form, cuguacuarana, which itself came from a Tupi-Guarani word of Brazil, suasuarana, literally meaning something like 'false deer' (from suasu, a deer, and rana, resembling), apparently because the animal's tawny coat recalled a deer's. The spelling drifted as the word passed from an indigenous South American language into Portuguese, then French, then English, which is why the modern form looks nothing like a typical Latin or Germanic word. The hard 'g' and the unstressed -ar ending are the legacy of that French shaping. In North America the same animal is also called the puma, panther, or mountain lion, but cougar became the dominant book name. A more recent and entirely separate slang sense, an older woman who dates younger men, appeared in popular culture around the year 2000.

How the word is built

• cougar (a single, unanalysable borrowing; no separable prefix, root, or suffix in English)