Nana

How to spell nana

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nana

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nana mean?

1. nounAn informal, affectionate name for one's grandmother.

Nana in a sentence

• Every Sunday we visit nana for lunch and a long chat.

• My nana taught me how to knit when I was eight.

Where does nana come from?

Language of origin: Other

Nana belongs to a family of affectionate nursery words built by repeating a single easy syllable, the same instinct that gives us mama, papa, dada and baba. The doubled na sound is one of the first consonant clusters infants produce, so across many languages it attaches naturally to close family members. In English nana settled as a cosy, informal name for a grandmother and, in some homes, for a nurse or nanny who helped raise the children; indeed the word nanny springs from the very same babbling root. It is recorded in English in this familiar sense from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because the word is simply na repeated with a final schwa, the spelling is wholly phonetic, and the only trap is remembering it ends in a soft a rather than the -er sound many speakers actually say.

How the word is built

• reduplicated child's syllable na-na, an affectionate term formed by doubling a single easy syllable