Kangaroo

How to spell kangaroo

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce kangaroo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kangaroo mean?

1. nounA large Australian marsupial with powerful hind legs for leaping and a pouch in which the female carries her young.

Kangaroo in a sentence

• The documentary followed a kangaroo bounding across the outback at dawn.

• At the wildlife park a young kangaroo peered out from its mother's pouch.

Where does kangaroo come from?

Language of origin: Other

Kangaroo comes from gangurru, a word in Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal Australian language spoken in the area around what is now Cooktown in northern Queensland. In that language gangurru named a particular large grey kangaroo species rather than the animals as a whole. The word was written down by the crew of Captain James Cook's expedition in 1770, with the naturalist Joseph Banks recording it as the local name for the strange leaping animal they had encountered. A long standing myth claims gangurru meant 'I don't understand you', but that story is false; linguists confirmed in the 1970s that it was a genuine animal name. The spelling settled into English with a single n and the doubled o at the end, and that final '-oo', plus the single n where some writers expect 'kanga-' to double, is the main place the word trips people up.

How the word is built

• kangaroo (a single indivisible borrowing from an Aboriginal Australian word; no native English prefix, root, or suffix parts)