Every spring, jacarandas take over Los Angeles. Purple petals blanket sidewalks, driveways, and parked cars across Southern California, and they drag the same question into millions of conversations: how do you actually say the word?
The answer isn’t simple. It depends on where you learned to talk.
Most English speakers say “jack-uh-RAN-duh.” That’s what English dictionaries print, it’s what most Angelenos grew up saying, and it’s what you’ll hear at most bus stops from San Diego to Santa Barbara. It isn’t the pronunciation closest to the word’s roots, but it’s not random either. There’s a reason for it, and that reason goes back centuries.
Spanish speakers, especially those from Mexico and Central America, say “hah-cah-RAHN-dah,” with a soft “h” sound at the front. If you’ve watched the Disney film “Encanto,” you’ve actually heard this version already. The song “What Else Can I Do” uses the word clearly enough that it works as a pronunciation reference. That film landed in tens of millions of homes without anyone framing it as a vocabulary lesson, but it was one.
There’s a second Spanish pronunciation that doesn’t get enough attention. The jacaranda tree didn’t originate in Mexico or Central America. Its native range runs through South America, specifically Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. In that region, the spelling shifts to jacarandá, with a written accent on the final syllable. Anyone who grew up watching Buenos Aires turn purple every spring says “hah-cah-rahn-DAH,” stress at the end. To speakers from each region, the difference is immediately obvious.
Go further back, though, and Spanish isn’t the origin either.
The word reached English through Portuguese, and before Portuguese, it came from Old Tupi, a language that served as a contact tongue across much of colonial Brazil. LAIST documented the full etymology, tracing the word to at least 1614, when it showed up in historical records spelled as yacaranda or îacaranda. From Old Tupi, it became jacarandá in Portuguese.
Here’s where the pronunciation story gets strange. In Portuguese, the letter “j” makes a “zh” sound, not the English “h” sound. “So the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation lands closer to ‘zhah-cah-run-DAH,’” according to linguistic sources on the etymology. That “zh” sound, not the English “h” sound, is how the word sounded before Spanish reshaped it.
That “zh” sound is the same one English speakers use in the middle of the word “treasure” or “measure.” It doesn’t come naturally at the start of English words, which is part of why it drops out. But it explains something unexpected about the English version. The hard “j” in “jack-uh-RAN-duh” is, in a roundabout way, closer to the original Portuguese “zh” sound than the Spanish “h” is. English speakers landed on something older without knowing why.
Old Tupi was widely spoken across colonial Brazil as a trading language before Portuguese displaced it. The Endangered Languages Project tracks what’s left of the Tupi language family today, a reminder of how much ground those languages have lost since the 1614 records that first put jacaranda in writing.
The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Services oversees the roughly 20,000 jacaranda trees in the city’s urban forest, which means the agency responsible for sweeping those petals off the streets doesn’t take an official position on pronunciation. That’s probably fine.
What’s worth knowing is that none of the common pronunciations are wrong, exactly. They’re just fossils of different transmission routes. “Jack-uh-RAN-duh” came through English dictionaries. “Hah-cah-RAHN-dah” came through Mexico and Central America. “Hah-cah-rahn-DAH” came through the Southern Cone. “Zhah-cah-run-DAH” is what the word sounded like when it was still mostly Portuguese. All of them trace back to Old Tupi speakers in South America who named this tree before 1614, long before it started shedding petals on cars in Los Angeles.