carnauba

1. 1.

   hard yellowish to brownish wax from leaves of the carnauba palm used especially in floor waxes and polishes

   Synonymscarnauba wax

   Broaderwax
2. 2.

   Brazilian fan palm having an edible root; source of a useful leaf fiber and a brittle yellowish wax

   Synonymscarnauba palmwax palmCopernicia pruniferaCopernicia cerifera

   Broaderfan palm

   Part ofCopernicia

Other forms of carnauba

plural

carnaubas·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about carnauba

What does carnauba mean?

carnauba means "hard yellowish to brownish wax from leaves of the carnauba palm used especially in floor waxes and polishes". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in carnauba?

carnauba has 3 syllables: car-nau-ba. The stress falls on "nau". In IPA it is /kɑɹˈnɔbɑ/.

What is another word for carnauba?

Close synonyms include carnauba wax, carnauba palm, wax palm, Copernicia prunifera, Copernicia cerifera. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is carnauba a common word?

carnauba is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.