Moroccan

How to spell moroccan

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce moroccan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does moroccan mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Morocco, its people, or its culture.
2. nounA person who is from Morocco or a native of Morocco.

Moroccan in a sentence

• adjective

  The restaurant serves a rich moroccan tagine slow-cooked with apricots.

• noun

  Our tour guide was a moroccan who had lived in Casablanca all his life.

• adjective

  She decorated the lounge with patterned moroccan tiles and lanterns.

• noun

  Many a moroccan travels abroad for work but returns home each summer.

Where does moroccan come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is built from the country name Morocco plus the suffix -an, which English uses to form words meaning 'belonging to' or 'a native of', as in 'American' or 'Italian'. The name Morocco itself reached English through Italian and Spanish forms (Marocco, Marruecos) of the city name Marrakesh, which for centuries served as the kingdom's chief city. Marrakesh in turn comes from a Berber phrase often understood as 'land of God' or 'land of passage'. Curiously, English speakers named the whole country after one city, while the country's own name in Arabic, al-Maghrib, means 'the west', describing its place at the far western edge of the Arab world. The double letters in the middle, the single 'r' followed by the doubled 'c', are the spelling trap, inherited directly from the Italian and Spanish spellings that fixed the form Morocco in English by the 1500s.

How the word is built

• Morocco (the country name)
• -an (adjective/noun suffix meaning 'belonging to' or 'a person from')