Mahogany

How to spell mahogany

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce mahogany

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mahogany mean?

1. nounA hard, reddish-brown tropical timber prized for furniture, or the tree that produces it.
2. nounA deep reddish-brown colour resembling that of polished mahogany wood.

Mahogany in a sentence

• The antique desk was carved from solid mahogany.

• She dyed her hair a warm mahogany before the wedding.

• A row of mahogany trees lined the plantation road.

• The leather sofa came in a rich mahogany that darkened with age.

Where does mahogany come from?

Language of origin: Other

Mahogany names a tropical hardwood tree and the rich reddish-brown timber it yields, and its earliest history is genuinely murky. The word surfaces in English in the middle of the 1600s, around the time English colonists encountered the tree in the Caribbean and Central America. It is widely thought to come from a native language of the region, possibly an Arawakan or Mayan source, and to have reached English partly through Spanish trade contact in the West Indies. Some scholars have even suggested an additional West African contribution, since the timber trade linked the Caribbean and the African coast, but no single route is certain. Because the origin is reconstructed rather than documented, the spelling settled by ear: writers hear the unstressed second syllable and the soft final '-any', which is exactly where the modern speller can slip, writing '-ony' or doubling letters. The reddish colour sense grew naturally from the famous hue of the polished wood.

How the word is built

• mahogan (the tree/wood name)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)