Tiger
nounA large wild cat of Asia with orange fur and black stripes, the biggest member of the cat family.
How to spell tiger
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce tiger
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does tiger mean?
- nounA large wild cat of Asia with orange fur and black stripes, the biggest member of the cat family.
Tiger in a sentence
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The zoo built a new enclosure for its tiger.
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A wild tiger can weigh more than two hundred kilograms.
Where does tiger come from?
Language of origin: Greek
The word traces back to the Greek tigris, the name for the great striped cat of Asia. The Greeks may have borrowed the term from an Old Persian or Iranian source, and one long-repeated tradition links it to a word meaning 'arrow' or 'sharp', a nod to the animal's swiftness, though that connection is not certain. From Greek the name passed into Latin as tigris and then into Old French as tigre, which is how it reached English in the early Middle Ages. Old English already had a form, and the modern spelling settled into 'tiger' by the medieval period, with the soft 'g' giving it the familiar two-syllable shape. The same root survives in the river name Tigris and in scientific terms such as 'tigrine', and the simple 'i-g-e-r' ending rarely trips up modern writers.
How the word is built
- tiger (single root, no separable affixes; from Greek tigris)
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