Kiwi

How to spell kiwi

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kiwi

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kiwi mean?

1. nounA small oval fruit with fuzzy brown skin and bright green flesh dotted with tiny black seeds.
2. nounA small, flightless, nocturnal bird native to New Zealand with a long slender bill.
3. nounAn informal term for a person from New Zealand.

Kiwi in a sentence

• She sliced a kiwi over her morning yoghurt.

• The documentary tracked a kiwi foraging for grubs after dark.

• As a proud kiwi, he flew home for the rugby final.

• The recipe calls for one ripe kiwi peeled and diced.

• The sanctuary protects the kiwi from introduced predators.

• Every kiwi on the tour group knew the words to the anthem.

Where does kiwi come from?

Language of origin: Other

Kiwi comes directly from the Maori language of New Zealand, where it names the small, flightless, nocturnal bird native to the islands. The word is widely thought to be onomatopoeic, echoing the shrill call of the male bird as it sounds at night. English adopted it in the late 1700s and early 1800s as European settlers and naturalists encountered the bird and recorded its local name. By the early twentieth century the term had been extended to mean a New Zealander, a sense made famous by soldiers in the First World War. The fruit sense is the most recent: the fuzzy brown fruit was originally called the Chinese gooseberry, and New Zealand growers rebranded it kiwifruit in the 1950s and 1960s for export, after which it was simply shortened to kiwi. Because the spelling maps so cleanly onto its sound, the main thing to remember is the two separate i's and the single w.

How the word is built

• kiwi (whole word from Maori; no separable prefix, root, or suffix)