A moose is a very large deer with long legs, a big nose, and, in males, wide flat antlers. It lives in northern forests of North America, Europe, and Asia, often near lakes and wetlands.
From an Algonquian language, probably Eastern Abenaki “moz,” meaning “he strips off,” referring to the animal’s habit of stripping bark from trees. English speakers adopted the Indigenous name.
Moose is one of many animal names we borrowed from Indigenous North American languages, and we kept its original plural form—no ‘meese.’ The word itself carries a tiny record of how closely those communities watched animal behavior.
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