What does boojum mean?
The boojum began life as a figment of Lewis Carroll's imagination. In his 1876 comic epic The Hunting of the Snark, a crew sets out to capture the snark, a creature impossible to describe; but the poem warns that some snarks are actually boojums — and whoever meets a boojum will, in the poem's famous line, 'softly and suddenly vanish away.' The word has since escaped the page in two unexpected directions. Botanists working in Baja California found a tall, spiny, otherworldly desert tree so strange that they christened it the boojum tree, borrowing Carroll's name for anything too peculiar to be believed. Physicists studying superfluid helium-3 likewise adopted the term for a type of defect in the fluid's structure. Today, then, a single nonsense syllable links Victorian nonsense verse, a Mexican desert giant, and modern condensed-matter physics — a rare case of pure literary invention becoming genuine scientific terminology.
In Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, a particularly dangerous kind of snark whose sighting causes the observer to vanish entirely.
"'For the Snark was a Boojum, you see,' the Bellman explained grimly to the anxious crew."
Almost always encountered in reference to Carroll's poem or as a playful allusion to it.
The boojum tree, Fouquieria columnaris: a tall, slender, spiny succulent tree of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico.
"Mature boojums can tower more than fifty feet above the desert floor."
Used mainly in botanical and horticultural contexts.
In condensed-matter physics, a type of topological defect occurring in superfluid helium-3.
"The theorists predicted that a boojum could form at the boundary between two phases of the superfluid."
Specialist usage; named in homage to Carroll's creature.
Regular English plural; used for both the fictional creatures and the trees.
"The hillside was dotted with boojums of every height."
When botanists discovered a bizarre, upside-down-looking desert tree in Baja California in the 1920s, they were so reminded of Lewis Carroll's terrifying boojum that they named the tree after it — and it's now called the boojum tree.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of boojum
The word was coined by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) for his 1876 poem The Hunting of the Snark. Carroll never explained its derivation, though it has often been suggested that he built it from words such as 'bogey' or 'jum' (as in jungle); the true origin remains uncertain. Its later scientific uses — the boojum tree, described botanically in the early twentieth century, and the superfluid 'boojum' named in the 1970s–80s — are direct deliberate borrowings from Carroll's coinage rather than independent developments.
How boojum is actually used
The word is whimsical and literary rather than everyday vocabulary. In botanical and scientific writing, "boojum" refers unambiguously to the tree or the physics phenomenon, while general readers will most likely meet the word through Carroll's poem. It carries a playful, slightly eerie connotation inherited from the original verse.
Easily confused with boojum
A snark is the broader class of elusive creatures in Lewis Carroll's poem, whereas a boojum is specifically the lethal variety of snark whose appearance makes its beholder vanish.