Possum vs. Opposum

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Danielle. I’m calling from Wells, Vermont.

Hello, Danielle. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I love it.

Oh, yay. What can we do for you?

My question is about the white-furred animals that come out at night and eat lots of ticks.

Is it possum or opossum?

Is the O silent?

And how do you write it out on the page?

And how do you say it?

So opossum or possum.

So these, they have the pointy nose.

And lots of teeth.

And they carry their babies outside on their fur, right?

Yes.

And they have the whip-like tails.

Yeah, sort of bear, right?

Yeah, bear, furless tails.

Yeah, yeah.

What do you say, Daniel?

Only marsupial in North America.

There you go.

Yes, yes.

Sounds like you’ve been doing some reading on it.

Yeah, they have lots of interesting anatomical features.

But what do you say for it?

I have always said a possum, and I think that’s because of how I read it on the page.

But my husband spent time in Georgia for his high school education, and he has only ever heard people say possum.

It just came up this week that it turns out those may have been the same thing, but I need to find out, could the O really be silent?

Or are they referring to a different animal?

What’s going on here?

Yeah, no, the O is not silent.

It’s two versions of the same word.

And it’s a really cool word.

It originated in a Native American language, Algonquian, where a similar sounding word to opossum meant the white animal or the white beast.

It took a couple of different terms that are kind of interesting because that Native American term got applied in this country to the animal that you’re describing.

And explorers also went to Australia and applied it to a different animal in Australia that usually has a furry tail and it’s got a ring and it’s called a possum, just simply possum, P-O-S-S-U-M.

So it’s not that the O is silent.

It’s really that there are two different versions of that word, opossum and possum.

And like your husband, I grew up saying possum.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, and, you know, grinning like a basket full of possum heads.

I never said that.

You know, because they kind of grin.

And I think mostly in the South, you would hear possum.

There’s a thing that happens when a word starts with a vowel like that, a vowel consonant, where it’s easy to lose that O because that first syllable is unstressed.

So that O defaults to a schwa or an O and it just falls away and it just turns into possum.

So that naturally happens for a lot of speakers.

And you will find almost from the very beginning the possum spellings where the O isn’t even there.

There’s no vowel at the beginning.

Like as soon as we find versions of the word that have the O, almost immediately we find versions of the word.

And we’re talking the 1600s.

We find versions of the word that don’t have the O at the beginning.

So it started immediately.

Yeah, yeah.

That process is called aphysis.

And the same thing happens with alone and lone, for example.

You don’t have that syllables not accented and it’s and it’s easy to just fall away.

So I think your question also is, is it correct to say a possum as opposed to an opossum?

Is that right?

Yeah.

I would say either one is correct.

I mean, an opossum sounds much more formal to me.

But it sounds like Danielle says a possum.

Are you saying the O is a schwa?

Are you saying…

Well, it sounds like it’s correct to say either A space possum or an space opossum.

Right. That is correct.

Some people will say opossum.

I got to admit, I usually, when I hear people say opossum, it’s in either an ironic or very self-conscious way.

I rarely hear people say anything but possum when they’re just speaking casually and not actually talking about the word.

When people are trying to make a point about the word, then they kind of overtly and winkingly say, oh, possum.

Yeah, I’m thinking of the term play possum.

You know, if somebody’s pretending they’re dead or something, an animal is pretending it’s dead.

I have never heard anybody say, oh, they’re playing, oh, possum.

No, they don’t say that.

Playing possum.

Yeah, and I would say play possum too, but okay, so maybe only if you think about it too hard.

Yeah, yeah.

But either one works across the United States.

Both are used, and possum probably is used by most people.

Okay, thank you so much.

Sure, thanks for calling.

Take care.

You too.

But this is a great example of a Native American word borrowed into English that has a long life and still has heavy daily use.

And I love that it not only is used in American English, but is used in Australian English as well, right?

It went a long way.

It went a long way.

And there is some debate in Australian English about the origins of the word.

Some of them don’t even know that it comes from a Native American language.

Yeah.

I heard a podcast recently where they were discussing it, and there was some befuddlement about where does this word come from, which of the Aboriginal languages, and they didn’t know.

And it was charming because they have their own rich linguistic history with their own local languages.

And so they were working hard at it but kind of missing the trick.

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