Other forms: pandas
A panda is the black-and-white bear from China that eats bamboo. Enormous, slow, and almost entirely vegetarian despite a carnivore's digestive system.
That mismatch is why it must eat for twelve hours a day to get enough. It became the symbol of conservation when the World Wildlife Fund adopted it in 1961, chosen partly because it printed well in the two colours they could afford. There is a separate red panda, which is not a bear at all. British police cars were once called panda cars for their markings.
1nounpandaA large black and white bear native to China that feeds on bamboo.
“The zoo has had a panda since the seventies.”
French
panda
English, today
panda
Borrowed from French panda. French panda, of unknown but probably from the second element of nigálya-pónya, a local name for the red panda recorded in Nepal and Sikkim by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800 or 1801 – 1894), an ethnologist, naturalist and the British Resident of Nepal, possibly from ne निँगाले (“relating to a certain species of bamboo”) (the adjectival form of निँगालो, a variant of निङालो (“Drepanostachyum intermedium, a species of bamboo”)) + a regional bo - name for the animal (compare regional bo ཕོ་ཉ (“messenger”)). Attributive uses of sense 2 (“a giant panda”) generally refer to that animal’s distinctive black and white coat colour.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA