Kayak

How to spell kayak

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kayak

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kayak mean?

1. nounA narrow, lightweight canoe-like boat for one or two people, propelled with a double-bladed paddle and usually sat in through a small deck opening.
2. verbTo travel or paddle in a kayak.

Kayak in a sentence

• noun

  She strapped the kayak to the roof of the car before the drive to the coast.

• verb

  They plan to kayak along the calm river all weekend.

• noun

  The rental shop charged twenty pounds an hour for a single kayak.

• verb

  Tourists can kayak around the bay with a trained guide.

Where does kayak come from?

Language of origin: Other

Kayak comes from the Inuit word qajaq, the name for the small, enclosed, one-person hunting boat used across the Arctic by the Inuit and related peoples. The original craft was a light wooden or bone frame stretched over sealskin, designed so a hunter could sit sealed into the deck and stay dry in freezing water. English picked the word up in the late 1600s, with the spelling settling into kayak by way of Danish and other European accounts of Greenland. The word is famously a palindrome, reading the same forwards and backwards, which is a handy memory hook for its symmetrical k-a-y-a-k shape. Because it entered English directly from an Arctic language rather than through Latin or French, it keeps an unusually plain spelling: the only real trap is the lone y sitting between the two identical a sounds.

How the word is built

• Single root borrowed whole from Inuit qajaq (a hunter's skin boat); not built from English prefixes or suffixes