Mammoth

How to spell mammoth

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mammoth

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mammoth mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely large in size, scale, or extent.
2. nounA large extinct elephant-like mammal with long curved tusks and a shaggy coat.

Mammoth in a sentence

• adjective

  The charity faces a mammoth task in rebuilding the flooded village.

• noun

  The museum displayed the skeleton of a woolly mammoth found in the permafrost.

• adjective

  Moving house turned into a mammoth undertaking that took the whole weekend.

• noun

  Scientists extracted ancient tissue from a frozen mammoth buried in Siberia.

Where does mammoth come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word came into English in the early 1700s from Russian, where the animal was called mamont or mammot. Russian speakers had borrowed the term from a Siberian language, possibly a word in the Mansi or another Ob-Ugric tongue meaning something like 'earth horn' or 'earth creature', a sensible name given that the frozen tusks were dug out of the Siberian permafrost. For centuries the great curved tusks were unearthed in Siberia, and locals imagined the beasts as giant burrowing animals that lived underground. As scientists studied these enormous extinct elephants, the creature's name became attached to the idea of sheer size, and by the early 1800s 'mammoth' was being used as an adjective meaning 'huge'. The double m and the unexpected -oth ending both reflect the Russian original rather than any English pattern, which is exactly where writers stumble.

How the word is built

• mammoth (a single root from Russian mamont, with no English prefix or suffix)