Zulu

How to spell zulu

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce zulu

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does zulu mean?

1. nounA member of the Nguni people of southern Africa, or their Bantu language.
2. nounThe code word for the letter Z in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Zulu in a sentence

• The museum exhibit traced the history of the zulu kingdom.

• The operator spelled the postcode and ended with zulu for the final letter.

• She spent a year learning zulu before moving to Durban.

• Pilots use zulu when they need to confirm a Z over a noisy channel.

Where does zulu come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word comes into English directly from the Zulu language itself, where the people call themselves amaZulu, meaning roughly 'the people of the heavens' or 'the sky people'. The root izulu in Zulu literally means 'sky' or 'heaven', and according to tradition it was the name of an early ancestral chief, so the group became known as 'the people of Zulu'. English speakers encountered the word in the early 1800s as the Zulu kingdom rose to prominence in southern Africa under the leader Shaka, and reports of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 fixed the spelling in the wider English-speaking world. In the twentieth century the word was given two further technical lives: it became the agreed code word for the letter Z in the NATO phonetic alphabet, and, by extension, the label for Coordinated Universal Time in aviation and the military. The simple double-vowel spelling, zu-lu, is phonetic and rarely causes trouble, which keeps it among the easier proper-noun loanwords.

How the word is built

• zulu (proper name of the Nguni people and language, used in English as a noun and adjective; no internal prefix or suffix)