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PORTUGUESE · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

Carandiru.

a stream in São Paulo, Brazil

9 characters4 syllables approx.Português language

Meaning & usage

name/ka.ɾɐ̃.d͡ʒiˈɾu/Brazil/kɐ.ɾɐ̃.diˈɾu/Portugal
  1. a stream in São Paulo, Brazil

    masculine
  2. a neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil

    masculine
  3. a former penitentiary in São Paulo, Brazil, notable for being the site of the Carandiru massacre

    historical · masculine
Where this word comes from

Uncertain. Eduardo de Almeida Navarro suggests it to be borrowed from Old Tupi karaná (“carandá”, a palm tree) + 'i (diminutive suffix) + ry (“river”), literally “river of the carandaís, small carandás”, but he acknowledges *karanda'i is not attested. The use of ry instead of 'y is quite unusual, and the evolution from *Karanda'iry to Carandiru requires a series of phonetic changes that together are not trivial. A word that is attested and phonetically similar to Carandiru is Língua Geral Paulista karanderu, itself borrowed from Portuguese carneiro; in his 2013 dictionary, Navarro does not take into account the only document that contains a record of this word. Being from Língua Geral Paulista, it is geographically compatible with the location of the Carandiru Stream. In any case, the name of the neighborhood is derived from the name of the stream, and the name of the penitentiary is derived from the name of the neighborhood.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.