Hippo

How to spell hippo

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hippo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hippo mean?

1. nounAn informal name for the hippopotamus, a large African mammal that lives in and near rivers.

Hippo in a sentence

• The children pressed against the glass to watch the hippo wallow in the muddy pool.

• A single hippo can weigh more than a small car.

Where does hippo come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Hippo is a casual shortening of hippopotamus, a word that came into English in the late 1500s from the Latin hippopotamus, itself borrowed from the Greek hippopotamos. The Greek term was built from two ordinary words: hippos, meaning 'horse', and potamos, meaning 'river', so the animal was literally described as a 'river horse'. Early English writers used the full Latin form, and the breezy clipped version 'hippo' only became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the animals grew familiar through zoos and travel writing. The same hippos root for 'horse' turns up in other English words, including the name Philip (a 'lover of horses') and the imaginary winged horse Pegasus is described with related vocabulary. Because the spelling keeps the double 'p' from the middle of hippopotamus, the only real trap is remembering that the consonant is doubled rather than single.

How the word is built

• clipped form of hippopotamus: hippo- (from Greek hippos: horse) shortened as a standalone noun