According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word kangaroo was introduced to English by Captain James Cook, who probably picked it up from Australian natives during his 1770 visit.

The same source indicates that joey, a term for the kangaroo’s young, comes likewise from that far-off continent; it was originally a slang expression indicating “anything young or small.”

But Webb’s “Weird Words” is not concerned with Australian marsupials — except insofar as they loan us the term for an uber-cool linguistic phenomenon:

It’s called a kangaroo word, and it means any term that contains its own synonym, with letters in the same order.

For instance, the verb feast contains the letters E, A and T in that order — giving us a synonym for the longer word. Similarly, feasted contains the synonymous ate. And the same thing occurs in such pairs as blossom and bloom; platter and plate; damsel and dame; gigantic and giant; market and mart; latest and last; prattle and prate; supremacist and racist; even something as simple as myself and me.

In such cases, the smaller word is called a joey, indicating a little one that’s “in the pouch” — I guess.

According to Wikipedia, kangaroo words often occur with the internal synonym intact. Instances include ACTion, MALIGNant and ADvertisement. But those aren’t nearly as much fun as, for example, deceased and departed — which both contain the word dead; or masculine, which yields the adjectival synonym male.

(In fact, a term like ad is closer to something called a clip, where a word is simply shortened; this occurs, for example, in many school-related terms: aud, lav, prom, trig, bio, lit, math, etc.)

In his fascinating book Tyrannosaurus Lex — where I first learned about kangaroo words — Rod L. Evans provides roughly 200 examples; and of course, various online sources contribute even more.

You won’t likely find any list more thorough than the appendix for kangaroo words at Wiktionary; but I also like the long and clever list at hitbullseye.com. Examples from that include deteriorate, which contains both die and rot. Likewise, prematurely contains early; and, as a precursor to my upcoming challenge below, see if you can find the four-letter synonym in precipitation.

And to finish here for now, I will simply list a pile of “parent” words — and you, dear reader, can spend the week trying to locate each joey inside the kangaroo:

Allocate, appropriate, astound, barren, before, Budweiser, calumnies, catacomb, chocolate, closemouthed, contaminate, contradictory, cooled, deliberate (as a verb), destruction, disappointed, disputation, encourage, equality, evacuate, exists, expurgate, falsities (same joey as “calumnies”), fragile, honorable, hurries, illuminated, indolent, inheritor, instructor, lighted (same joey as “illuminated”), municipality, ornamented, playfellow, precipitation, prematurely, postured, rambunctious, rampage, rapscallion, recline, respite, restrain, rotund, revolution, salvage, slithered, strives, substandard, tosspot (you might have to look up the meaning on that one), transgression and unsightly.

Keep in mind that some of these lose just a couple of letters, whereas others — like playfellow and disappointed — get more drastically curtailed (or should I say … cut). Here’s hoping you can observe — or see, to put it more briefly — the shorter word inside the longer.

Answers next week!