Word.ws English Dictionary

tatouay

tatouay noun: an armadillo (Cabassous tatouay), native to tropical South America; the broad-banded armadillo.

Noun

tatouay (plural tatouays)

  1. An armadillo (Cabassous tatouay), native to tropical South America; the broad-banded armadillo.

Forms of tatouay

pluraltatouays

Origin of tatouay

From a compound word in a Tupi-Guarani language (compare tatu-ai), of which the first element is ultimately from Old Tupi tatu (“armadillo”). Compare Portuguese tatu, French tatou. The second element (ay or ai) may mean "wound" because of a belief that its fat was used on wounds, or "colored", or "worthless".

Questions about tatouay

What does tatouay mean?
Tatouay means an armadillo (Cabassous tatouay), native to tropical South America; the broad-banded armadillo.
What part of speech is tatouay?
Tatouay is a noun.
What is the plural of tatouay?
The plural of tatouay is tatouays.

Words near tatouay in the dictionary

  1. Tatooine
  2. tatoos
  3. tator
  4. tators
  5. tatou
  6. tatouay
  7. tatouays
  8. tatouhou
  9. tatous
  10. TATP
  11. tatpurusa

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tatouay (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: “tatouay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tatouay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.