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

moose

UK/muːs/US/muːs/
nounB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,518 of 15,258neutral

A moose is a very large deer of North America. The biggest deer alive, with a heavy nose and enormous flat antlers.

It is the same animal Europeans call an elk, which is one of the more confusing facts in English, since elk means something different again in America. The plural is moose, unchanged, so one moose and six moose. They are strong swimmers and a genuine hazard on roads in Canada and the northern United States. The word came into English from an Algonquian language.

Paxson Woelber · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of moose

  1. 1nounmooseA very large North American deer with broad flat antlers.B1

    “A moose crossed the road ahead of the truck.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Algonquian

    *mo·swa — it strips

  2. wam

    moos

  3. English, today

    moose

Earlier mus, moos, from an Eastern Algonquian language name for the animal, such as wam moos, xnt moos or aaq mos (cognate to Abenaki moz), from Proto-Algonquian mo·swa (“it strips”), referring to how a moose strips tree bark when feeding: compare wam moos-u (“he strips, cuts smooth”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 13 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

moose in the wild

  • Hunting shaped the relationship between moose and humans, both in Eurasia and North America.

    Moose

  • Unlike most other deer species, moose do not form herds and are solitary animals, aside from calves who remain with their mother until the cow begins estrus again.

    Moose

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.