Tundra

How to spell tundra

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tundra

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tundra mean?

1. nounA vast, flat, treeless region of the Arctic or high mountains where the subsoil is permanently frozen and only low vegetation grows.

Tundra in a sentence

• The documentary followed a herd of caribou across the frozen tundra.

• Researchers measured how quickly the tundra thaws as the climate warms.

Where does tundra come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word names the cold, treeless plains of the far north, and English borrowed it directly from Russian tundra in the late nineteenth century, around the 1840s. The Russians had in turn taken the word from the Kildin Sami language of the Kola Peninsula, where tūndâr meant 'uplands' or a 'treeless mountain tract'. The Sami sense pointed to high, bare ground above the tree line, which matches the modern meaning of a frozen plain where the subsoil stays permanently frozen and only low shrubs, mosses, and lichens grow. Because the word arrived whole from a distant language, its spelling is phonetic and surprisingly tidy for English: there is no silent letter and no Latin or Greek root to second-guess. The main trap is simply the unstressed second syllable, where the 'a' is reduced to a faint schwa and can tempt a writer toward 'tundr' or 'tundera'.

How the word is built

• tundra (a single borrowed root; not decomposable into prefix, root, and suffix in English)