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arowana

noun

arowana is a noun meaning “Any of various large freshwater fish belonging to the family Osteoglossidae (especially from genera Heterotis, Osteoglossum, and Scleropages), found…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-R-O-W-A-N-A, and it appears about once in every 35 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of arowana is arowanas.

What does arowana mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various large freshwater fish belonging to the family Osteoglossidae (especially from genera Heterotis, Osteoglossum, and Scleropages), found in South America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Africa. These fish are mainly carnivorous and are characterized by large, bony scales, a toothed tongue, and a wide, slanted mouth.

  2. 2

    USScleropages formosus (Asian bonytongue)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Forms of arowana

  • arowanas plural
  • arahuana
  • arawana
  • aruana

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is arowana?

Arowana appears about once in every 35 million words in written English, the 180,281st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Arowana in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense of the family Osteoglossidae:

LanguageWords
Portuguesearuanã

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does arowana come from?

Borrowed from New Latin, specific epithet of Osteoglossum arowana (now Osteoglossu bicirrhosum), borrowed from Guyanese Kari'na arawana (“the fish Osteoglossum bicirrhosum”; or a like form in Macushi), borrowed, probably via Nheengatu arawanã, from Old Tupi aruanã.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).