Mustang

How to spell mustang

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mustang

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mustang mean?

1. nounA small, hardy, free-roaming horse descended from animals brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers.

Mustang in a sentence

• The rancher spent weeks trying to tame the captured mustang.

• A herd of mustang thundered across the open plain at dawn.

Where does mustang come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word travelled into American English from Spanish in the middle of the 1800s, and behind it sit two related Spanish words: mestengo and mostrenco, both meaning a stray, ownerless, or wandering animal. The earlier of these comes from mesta, the name for the powerful Spanish association of sheep and cattle graziers; an animal that strayed from the herds and could not be claimed was an animal 'of the mesta', and so the term came to mean a beast with no owner. When the descendants of horses brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers ran wild across the western plains, English-speaking settlers borrowed the Spanish label for these free-roaming horses. The spelling shifted as it crossed into English, with the original 'me-' softening to 'mu-' and the ending settling as '-tang'. The same wild-horse glamour later gave its name to a famous American car, which is why many people meet the word first as a brand and only later as the animal.

How the word is built

• mustang (single root, from Spanish mestengo: stray or ownerless animal); not formed from English prefixes or suffixes