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PlainSpell

nanook

noun

nanook is a noun meaning “A polar bear” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled N-A-N-O-O-K, and it appears about once in every 17 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of nanook is nanooks.

What does nanook mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A polar bear.

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

Forms of nanook

  • nanooks plural

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

How common is nanook?

Nanook appears about once in every 17 million words in written English, the 122,704th 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).

Where does nanook come from?

Borrowed from Inuktitut ᓇᓄᖅ (nanoq, “polar bear”).

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