What does cannibal mean?
A cannibal is a person or animal that eats the flesh of members of its own species. In its primary human sense, the term refers to someone who consumes human flesh, whether out of starvation (so-called survival cannibalism), as part of ritual or funerary practice, or as a criminal act. Because eating human flesh violates one of the most deeply held taboos across virtually all cultures, the word carries an intense charge of horror and moral transgression, and it appears frequently in literature, film, and folklore as shorthand for savagery or the collapse of civilisation. The word also has a neutral scientific application: biologists describe many animals — including some spiders, sharks, and rodents — as cannibals when they prey on their own kind. Beyond the literal sense, the derived verb 'cannibalize' is common in engineering and business, meaning to salvage parts from one item to repair another, or to draw sales away from one product with another. The word ultimately traces back through Spanish 'caníbal' to 'Carib', the name of an Indigenous Caribbean people.
nounA person who eats the flesh of other human beings; more broadly, an animal that feeds on the flesh of its own species.
- A human who eats the flesh of other humans.
- An animal that consumes members of its own species.
"The survivors of the shipwreck were driven to acts no one dared speak of, and whispers of cannibal haunted the rescue ships for years."
"Early European accounts of the Caribbean described certain peoples as cannibals, though many such reports were later shown to be exaggerated or fabricated."
"In many species of spider and insect, the female is a cannibal, sometimes consuming her mate after copulation."
Standard regular plural; no irregular forms exist.
"The old sailors' tales were full of islands inhabited by cannibals."
The word 'cannibal' comes from Carib, the name of a Caribbean people whom Columbus's men accused of eating human flesh — so an entire ethnic group's name became the word for man-eating.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of cannibal
The English word 'cannibal' comes from the Spanish 'caníbal', which itself derives from 'Caríbal', a variant of 'Carib' — the name of an Indigenous people of the Caribbean. When Columbus and his contemporaries reached the region in the late 15th century, they reported (with varying degrees of accuracy) that some Carib groups practised ritual cannibalism, and the ethnonym became generalised into a term for any eater of human flesh. The word entered English by the mid-16th century and quickly spread across European languages. It is unrelated to Latin or Greek roots; however, the rarer synonym 'anthropophagite' does come from the Greek 'anthropos' (human) plus 'phagein' (to eat).
Related word forms
How cannibal is actually used
The word carries strong taboo connotations and is rarely used lightly; in zoology it is used neutrally to describe animals that eat their own kind. The verb 'to cannibalize' (to strip parts from one machine to repair another, or to lose sales to one's own product) derives from this word and is far more common in everyday business and technical English than the literal noun.
Easily confused with cannibal
Canine relates to dogs or dog-like animals, whereas a cannibal is a being that eats members of its own species — the two share only a vague phonetic resemblance.