Maroon

How to spell maroon

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce maroon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does maroon mean?

1. nounA dark brownish-red or purplish-red colour.
2. verbTo leave someone trapped and isolated in a place they cannot easily escape from.

Maroon in a sentence

• noun

  The bridesmaids wore dresses in a deep maroon.

• verb

  The storm threatened to maroon the hikers on the ridge overnight.

• noun

  He chose a maroon leather sofa for the study.

• verb

  A broken engine can maroon a crew far from any port.

Where does maroon come from?

Language of origin: French

This single spelling actually hides two different histories. The colour sense comes from the French word marron, meaning 'chestnut', the large brown nut; English borrowed it in the 1700s first for the nut itself and then for its dark brownish-red colour. The verb sense, meaning to abandon someone in an isolated place, traces instead to the Spanish cimarron, which described a wild or untamed animal and later a runaway who had fled to the hills; English clipped and reshaped this into 'maroon' during the 1600s. From that came the noun Maroon for communities of escaped enslaved people who set up free settlements in the Caribbean and the Americas. The doubled 'o' is the spelling trap: the French marron has a double 'r' and single 'o', so English speakers must remember the form flipped to single 'r' and double 'o' on its way into our spelling.

How the word is built

• maroon (from French marron: chestnut), the colour and the verb sharing a spelling but reaching English by different routes