Wapiti

Origin

From Cree or Shawnee waapiti ("elk; white rump").

Full definition of wapiti

Noun

1. (US, Canada) The American elk ( or Cervus canadensis). It was formerly considered to be in the same species as the European red deer, which it somewhat exceeds in size.
• 1877 April, Sanborn Tenney, , in Popular Science, Volume 10,Of deer there are in North America perhaps eight species : the black-tailed deer of the Pacific coast ; the mule-deer, and the white-tailed deer, of the Upper Missouri region and westward; the common deer of the United States east of the Missouri ; the wapiti of the northern and northwestern portions of the United States; one or two species of reindeer ; and the moose of the northern portion of the continent. ... Next to the moose, the wapiti or American elk (Cervus Canadensis) is the largest deer in North America.
• 1904 December 6, Theodore Roosevelt, ,In connection with the work of the forest reserves I desire again to urge upon the Congress the importance of authorizing the President to set aside certain portions of these reserves or other public lands as game refuges for the preservation of the bison, the wapiti, and other large beasts once so abundant in our woods and mountains and on our great plains, and now tending toward extinction.
• 1919, Saki, , in The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers,You see, if we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some other species of browsing animal there we could explain the general absence of vegetation by a reference to the fauna of the garden: ‘You can’t have wapiti and Darwin tulips, you know, so we didn’t put down any bulbs last year.’ As it is, we haven’t got the wapiti, and the Darwin tulips haven’t survived the fact that most of the cats of the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the centre of the tulip bed; ....