ouragan (French)

Where does "ouragan" come from?

The French noun 'ouragan', meaning hurricane, ultimately comes from the Taíno word '*hurakā', which also meant hurricane. It reached French through a Caribbean form containing a /-ɡ-/ sound, a route that carried the word from the indigenous languages of the Caribbean into European speech[1].

Open questions

• The asterisked Taíno form '*hurakā' is a reconstruction rather than a directly attested word, so its exact shape is inferred. [1]
• The intermediate Caribbean form that carried the word into French is not named in the available data, so the precise transmission route remains unspecified. [1]

Full etymology tree

• ouragan (French), 'hurricane'
  • borrowed (Caribbean)
    • borrowed *hurakā (Taíno), 'hurricane'

Ancestors

• *hurakā (Taíno)

Descendants and derived words

• zouragan (Haitian Creole)
• ouragan (Norman)
• huragan (Polish)
• uragan (Romanian)

Sources

1. ouragan (French) - Wiktionary

Updated October 2026

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Etymology data from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · About Miraris