Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

cougar

UK/ˈkuːɡə/US/ˈkuɡɚ/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,944 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: cougars

A cougar is a large tawny American wild cat. A cougar sighting, track the cougar, a cougar in the hills.

It has more names than any other animal in English, since puma, mountain lion, panther and catamount all mean the same beast. It has the widest range of any land mammal in the Americas and almost never attacks people.

National Park Service · Public domain

Definitions of cougar

  1. 1nouncougarA large tawny American wild cat.B2

    “Hikers in the Rocky Mountains are warned to watch out for cougars.”

cougar is an animal.

Where it comes from

French couguar comes through Portuguese from a Tupi name for the animal.

  1. tpw

    sûasuarana

  2. pt-BR

    suçuarana

  3. Portuguese

    cuguardo

  4. French

    couguar

  5. English, today

    cougar

From French couguar, from Portuguese cuguardo, a deformation of pt-BR suçuarana (earlier çuçuarana), from tpw sûasuarana.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

cougar in the wild

  • The cougar, also called puma, mountain lion, catamount, and panther, is a large feline native to the Americas.

    Cougar

  • Fatal attacks on humans are rare but increased in North America as more people entered cougar habitat and built farms.

    Cougar

  • The cougar is also commonly known as mountain lion, puma, mountain cat, catamount, or panther.

    List of fatal cougar attacks in North America

  • Fatal cougar attacks are extremely rare and occur much less frequently than fatal snake bites, fatal lightning strikes, or fatal bee stings.

    List of fatal cougar attacks in North America

  • As his name indicates, Butch is a cougar.

    Butch T. Cougar

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.