kipilefti

Swahili

Alternative forms

Etymology

Borrowed from English keep left, from the keep left sign that appeared at the entrance.[1][2]

Noun

kipilefti (ki-vi class, plural vipilefti)

  1. roundabout
    Synonym: mzunguko

References
  1. Rory Sutherland (4 January 2014), “Why don’t Americans have kettles?”, in The Spectator‎: “Some clearly exist in Africa, since the Swahili for roundabout is kipi-lefti from the ‘Keep Left’ sign that appeared at the entrance.”
  2. Welmers, William Everett (1973) African Language Structures, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, →ISBN, page 160:
    In Swahili, the English instruction on a road sign has been adopted to refer to a traffic circle or roundabout; the Swahili form is /kipilefti/. By analogy with a great many nouns in which /ki-/ is a singular prefix and which have plural forms with a prefix /vi-/, the first syllable of this noun is re-analyzed as a prefix, and more than one traffic circle is, of course, /vipilefti/.
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