Mexican

How to spell mexican

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mexican

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mexican mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Mexico, its people, or its culture.
2. nounA person from Mexico or of Mexican descent.

Mexican in a sentence

• adjective

  The restaurant serves authentic mexican food every evening.

• noun

  As a proud mexican, he often spoke about his hometown near Guadalajara.

• adjective

  She studied mexican history at university for three years.

• noun

  The conference welcomed a young mexican who had won an engineering prize.

Where does mexican come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word is formed from the place name Mexico plus the English suffix -an, which marks belonging or origin, as in 'American' or 'Italian'. Mexico itself descends from the Nahuatl name Mexihco, the heartland of the Aztec people, and reached English through Spanish, which spelled the name with an x that was once pronounced like a soft 'sh' sound. When the Spanish adopted the name in the 1500s they kept that x, and English borrowed both the country name and the derived adjective largely unchanged. The spelling trap is precisely that x, since the modern pronunciation sounds like a 'ks', tempting writers to imagine some other letter pattern. The form 'Mexican' as an English word for a person or thing from Mexico is recorded from the late sixteenth century onward.

How the word is built

• Mexic- (from Mexico, ultimately from the Nahuatl name Mexihco)
• -an (adjective/noun suffix meaning 'of or belonging to')