Jaguar

How to spell jaguar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce jaguar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does jaguar mean?

1. nounA large, powerful spotted wild cat native to the Americas, related to the leopard.

Jaguar in a sentence

• The wildlife documentary followed a single jaguar hunting along the riverbank.

• Conservationists are tracking the jaguar population across the rainforest.

Where does jaguar come from?

Language of origin: Other

Jaguar comes from the Tupi-Guarani languages of South America, where a word recorded as yaguara or jaguara meant something like 'beast of prey' or 'one that kills with a single leap'. Portuguese traders and settlers in Brazil picked up the term, and it passed through Spanish and Portuguese into the wider European languages during the 1600s. English adopted it in that century to name the large spotted cat of the Americas, distinguishing it from the leopard of the Old World. The spelling kept the unusual 'jagu-' cluster from its South American source rather than being reshaped into something more obviously English, which is exactly why the silent-feeling middle and the '-uar' ending trip writers up. The same word later became famous as a British car marque, but the animal name is the original.

How the word is built

• jaguar (a single indivisible borrowing from Tupi-Guarani yaguara, 'beast of prey'; no English prefix or suffix)