Word.ws English Dictionary

tanooki

tanooki is the alternative spelling of tanuki.

Meaning of tanuki

Noun

tanuki (plural tanuki or tanukis)

  1. A raccoon dog, Nyctereutes viverrinus.
    • At my onboarding, I was told that one of GitHub's employees identified as a tanuki, a Japanese raccoon dog—this was fine.2023 May 28, Nadia Asparouhova, “Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture”, in Wired, →ISSN
    Synonyms:
    mangut
  2. (Japanese) A folkloric figure in the form of a tanuki, regarded as a shapeshifter and renowned for its enormous scrotum and testicles.
  3. The joining of a living bonsai tree to a piece of dead wood for aesthetic effect.

Forms of tanooki

pluraltanooki
pluraltanookis

Questions about tanooki

What is tanooki the alternative spelling of?
Tanooki is the alternative spelling of tanuki.

Words near tanooki in the dictionary

  1. Tanoan
  2. tanoas
  3. tanod
  4. tanods
  5. tanomastat
  6. tanooki
  7. tanookis
  8. tanorexia
  9. tanorexic
  10. tanorexics
  11. Tanori

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tanooki (page history and authors); tanuki (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “tanooki.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tanooki. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.