My Palm “Dictionary” doesn’t know.
My Langenscheidft dictionary doesn’t know.
My Harper-Collins dictionary doesn’t know.
My Oxford-Duden and Macmillan visual dictionaries don’t know.
A little help? Thanks.
Background: I caught a possum (in the middle of non-wooded suburbs! God knows where they hide out), and it scared the life out of me (I thought, what an ugly cat). I’m trying to explain what it is to my Spanish-speaking wife.
I suspect that there is no word in Spanish, or rather that the word is “opossum.” I found one website in Spanish that used the word “opossum.” Your wife probably just doesn’t know what it is because they didn’t live where she grew up.
Sorry the URL got messed up – yet another example of why preview is handy. In any case, I removed the photos because it seems Apple’s “Publish to HomePage” conflicts with my own HTML files without warning – but we all know what a possum is, right? (Well, other than my wife).
Your explanations left me wondering something else, though. I’d not thought to look for “opossum” in any dictionaries, since (1) I thought it was “o’possum” and (2) “o’possum” was some ancient, silly regional thing that meant “old possum” and hence wasn’t a “real” word. You know, kind of like saying “taters” for potato.
First, there are a wide variety of creatures called “possums,” and all of them are marsupials.
AFAIK, there are no vernacular names in Spanish for the Australian possums (and they are properly “possum” – the “o-” refers to the American critters).
Family Didelphidae, the opossums, is mostly South American, with two species north of Central America, the Virginia opossum (AKA roadkill ;)) for which the answers above are accurate, and the yapok, or water opossum, which is common from Mexico through most of South America. (IIRC yapoks do not cross the Sonoran Desert as a rule but there have been sporadic reports over the years from the river valleys near the US-Mexican border.) There are quite a few other species in South America, all of which have vernacular names in Spanish in the same way as English differentiates between the weasel, the ferret, the ermine, the stoat, the marten, the fisher, and about half a dozen other “weasels” (in the generic sense).