rhinoceros
/ɹaɪˈnɑ.sə.ɹəs/noun
rhinoceros is spelled R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-O-S. The wrong spelling people search most is rhinocerus: about 70 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 63 of all searches for the word. Rhinoceros is a noun meaning “Any large herbivorous ungulate mammal native to Africa and Asia of the family Rhinocerotidae, with thick…”. The plural of rhinoceros is rhinoceroses or rhinocerosses; Wiktionary also lists rhinoceri (nonstandard), rhinoceroi (nonstandard), rhinocerotes (archaic).
How do you spell rhinoceros?
Rhinoceros is spelled R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-O-S. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 62 of the searches for rhinoceros in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does rhinoceros mean?
noun
- 1
Any large herbivorous ungulate mammal native to Africa and Asia of the family Rhinocerotidae, with thick, gray skin and one or two horns on their snouts.
- 2
An ungulate mammal of the superfamily Rhinocerotoidea, including the hornless Paraceratherium.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce rhinoceros?
- UK /ɹaɪˈnɒs.ə.ɹəs/
- US /ɹaɪˈnɑ.sə.ɹəs/
- Australia /ɹɑɪˈnɔs.ə.ɹəs/
Rhinoceros has 4 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_(NaomiAmethyst)-rhinoceros.wav, En-us-rhinoceros.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of rhinoceros
- rhinoceroses plural
- rhinocerosses plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is rhinoceros?
Rhinoceros appears about once in every 1 million words in written English, the 34,912th 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).
Rhinoceros in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense herbivorous pachyderm with horn(s):
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | rhinocéros |
| German | Nashorn, Rhinozeros |
| Portuguese | rinoceronte |
| Spanish | rinoceronte |
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 rhinoceros come from?
From Latin rhīnocerōs, from Ancient Greek ῥῑνόκερως (rhīnókerōs, “nose-horned”), composed of ῥῑ́ς, ῥῑνός (rhī́s, rhīnós, “nose, of (the) nose”) + κέρας (kéras, “horn”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).