- Word History
|part of speech:
||marooned, marooning, maroons
||to leave on an island or coast, far from other people; abandon.
The pirates marooned the children on a desert island.
- similar words:
- abandon, jettison
are homographs; they are spelled the same but have different meanings and different origins. Maroon1
comes from a French word that means "a chestnut" (a deep red-brown nut). Maroon2
comes from an early Spanish word that meant "a mountain-top." Five hundred years ago, in the West Indies, a "maroon" was an escaped slave who had fled to the mountains to escape Spanish rulers. The word "maroon" later came to mean "to abandon someone in a wild and isolated place."