Moose

How to spell moose

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce moose

What does moose mean?

1. nounA very large deer of northern forests, the male having broad flattened antlers.

Moose in a sentence

• A moose wandered onto the highway and stopped all the traffic.

• The bull moose shed its huge antlers every winter.

Where does moose come from?

Language of origin: Other

Moose came into English in the early 1600s from an Algonquian language of the northeastern woodlands, most likely Eastern Abenaki 'moos' or a closely related Narragansett form. The native word is thought to mean something like 'he strips or eats off bark', describing the animal's habit of browsing on twigs, leaves, and the bark of young trees. English colonists in New England adopted it directly because the creature was unfamiliar to them and had no European name; what Europeans called an 'elk' was a different animal, so the borrowed word filled a real gap. The unusual double 'o' simply mirrors the long 'oo' sound the settlers heard, and that spelling has stayed remarkably stable ever since. The main modern trap is purely auditory: moose sounds identical to the dessert 'mousse', yet the two share no history at all, since mousse is a French word for 'froth' or 'foam'.

How the word is built

• moose (a single, indivisible root borrowed whole from an Algonquian language; no prefix or suffix)