What does acajou mean?
Acajou is a noun referring primarily to mahogany — particularly the richly coloured, fine-grained hardwood of the West Indies and Central America that became the material of choice for European cabinetmakers in the eighteenth century. In furniture and antiques contexts, describing a piece as made of acajou signals quality and age, much as calling it mahogany would, though the term carries a more continental, trade-oriented flavour. The word has a second, now largely obsolete sense: it originally entered European languages as a name for the cashew tree and its nut, borrowed from an indigenous South American language via Portuguese and French. Today you are most likely to meet acajou in auction catalogues, heritage interiors, or discussions of period furniture, where it denotes the warm, reddish-brown timber rather than anything edible. It remains a useful word for anyone interested in antiques, woodworking, or the history of colonial trade goods.
Mahogany, especially West Indian or Central American mahogany used in fine furniture-making.
"The commode was veneered in solid acajou with gilt-bronze mounts."
Chiefly found in antiques, furniture, and interior-design contexts.
(dated) The cashew tree, Anacardium occidentale, or its edible nut.
"Seventeenth-century travellers described plantations of acajou along the Brazilian coast."
This sense is now obsolete in general English use.
Rarely pluralised; when referring to the timber, acajou is typically treated as an uncountable mass noun.
"The forest yielded great quantities of acajou."
Acajou once meant the cashew — until European cabinetmakers fell so hard for Caribbean mahogany that the word shifted to the wood itself.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of acajou
Acajou entered English from French, which had adopted it from Portuguese, ultimately deriving from a word in a Tupi language of Brazil for the cashew tree. When Europeans encountered the magnificent mahogany forests of the Caribbean and Central America, the same term was applied to that timber, and by the eighteenth century acajou was established in the furniture trade as a name for mahogany. The original 'cashew' sense survives in the English word cashew, which traces back to the same indigenous source.
How acajou is actually used
Acajou is a relatively rare, somewhat formal or specialist word in modern English, encountered mainly in furniture catalogues, antiques dealing, and historical texts. Its 'cashew' sense is largely obsolete outside historical sources.
Easily confused with acajou
Acajou originally denoted the cashew tree and its nut (from the Tupi word acajú), but in modern English it chiefly refers to mahogany timber, so using it to mean the nut is now rare and dated.