Shampoo

How to spell shampoo

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shampoo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shampoo mean?

1. nounA liquid soap formulated for washing the hair and scalp.
2. verbTo wash something, especially hair or carpet, with shampoo.

Shampoo in a sentence

• noun

  The hotel left a small bottle of shampoo by the sink.

• verb

  The cleaners came in to shampoo the office carpets overnight.

• noun

  This shampoo is meant for dry or coloured hair.

• verb

  Remember to shampoo the dog before the show.

Where does shampoo come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

This is one of English's clearest souvenirs from colonial India. It comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, the imperative of chāmpnā, which meant 'to press, knead, or massage', and which traces back through the Indo-Aryan languages to a Sanskrit root for pressing. When the word first entered English in the middle of the 1700s it had nothing to do with hair: to 'shampoo' a person meant to give them a vigorous massage, often as part of a steam bath or Turkish bath. Only in the 1830s and 1840s did the sense narrow to mean washing and massaging the scalp, and from there the noun for the cleansing liquid itself emerged later in the century. The doubled 'oo' spelling, which catches some writers out, simply reflects an English attempt to capture the long final vowel of the Hindi original.

How the word is built

• shampoo (from Hindi chāmpo, 'press/knead'), an unanalysable single root in English with no prefix or suffix