This weekend I heard a podcast mention the concept of a kangaroo word, so decided to have some fun dreaming up some derivative concepts.

Kangaroo words contain letters of another word with the same or similar meaning, in the correct order but not necessarily consecutively. For example, the word chicken has the word hen in it and masculine has male.

(I’m ignoring simplistic examples like advertisement contains the words advertise or ad.)

The concept of a kangaroo word is derived from the fact that kangaroos carry their young, known as joeys, in a body pouch. Therefore, the similar word inside a kangaroo word should be called a joey word. If masculine is the kangaroo word, then male inside of it is the joey word.

There are likely hundreds of kangaroo words in the English language. This site came up with a gigantic (kangaroo) / giant (joey) list.

A twin kangaroo word is a kangaroo word that contains two joey words. These are a lot less common: the word feasted has fed and ate in it, while the word container has tin and can.

For fun, we could imagine that a nesting doll kangaroo word is one that has a joey inside it which is itself a kangaroo word with a joey inside it. This is likely even rarer. The word expurgate contains purge which contains pure.

That’s two levels of kangaroo nesting dolls. I couldn’t come up with three levels.

Following this logic, an anti-kangaroo word would be a kangaroo word that contains a joey word that is its antonym. Feast contains fast and wonderful contains woeful.

If you really want to mix things up in the word fun department, imagine a nesting anti-kangaroo word in which the first joey is an antonym and the second joey is a synonym. I spent waaaaay too much time trying to come up with a combination and this is the best I could devise:

Fabrication (made up) → Fact (truth) → Act (pretense)

Can YOU find an example of a nesting anti-kangaroo word?

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