Raccoon

How to spell raccoon

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce raccoon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does raccoon mean?

1. nounA nocturnal North American mammal with a ringed tail and a distinctive black mask of fur across its eyes.

Raccoon in a sentence

• A raccoon tipped over the bins and scattered rubbish across the driveway.

• The campers locked the cooler so a raccoon could not raid their food overnight.

Where does raccoon come from?

Language of origin: Other

Raccoon comes from the Powhatan language of the Algonquian family, spoken by Indigenous people in the region that became Virginia. The original word was recorded by English colonists around 1608 in forms such as 'aroughcun' or 'arathkone', which is usually explained as meaning something like 'one that scratches with its hands', a fitting description of the animal's dextrous, almost handlike paws. As English speakers shortened and reshaped the unfamiliar sounds, it drifted toward 'rahcoon' and then settled into the modern 'raccoon'. The spelling trap is entirely about the consonants: the doubled c and the single n at the end, since the word looks as if it could just as easily take a double n. Because the animal is native to the Americas, the word travelled outward from North America into wider English, and it remains one of the better known loanwords from an Algonquian source, alongside relatives such as 'moose' and 'opossum'.

How the word is built

• raccoon (single root, from a Powhatan word; the modern English spelling doubles the c and ends in -oon)