Manila

How to spell manila

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce manila

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does manila mean?

1. nounA strong, light yellowish-brown paper or card, or the colour of it, typically used for envelopes and folders.
2. nounA strong fibre obtained from the abaca plant, used to make rope and twine.

Manila in a sentence

• She filed the contract in a plain manila folder.

• The dock workers hauled the boat in with thick manila rope.

• The cheque arrived in a small manila envelope.

• Old sailing ships relied on manila for their rigging.

Where does manila come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is a place name pressed into service as the name of a material. It comes directly from Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, which from the colonial era onward was the main port shipping abaca, a tough fibre stripped from a relative of the banana plant. Rope and cordage made from that fibre became known as manila hemp, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the same word attached itself to the strong, buff-coloured paper and card originally manufactured from those same fibres, hence the familiar manila envelope and manila folder. The city name itself is thought to derive from the Tagalog phrase may nila, meaning roughly 'where the nila plant grows', referring to an indigo-yielding shrub once common in the area. Because the word is simply the city's name, it keeps a single l and ends in a plain -a; writers sometimes wrongly double the l by analogy with words like 'vanilla', which is the main spelling trap here.

How the word is built

• manila (from the place name Manila, capital of the Philippines, the original export point of the fibre)