sabana

Savannah (savanna) comes from Taíno zabana or sabana — meaning a treeless plain or grassland. Spanish adopted it as sabana in the early 1500s.

The word was first applied to the flat grasslands of the Caribbean and Central America. When Europeans encountered similar landscapes in Africa, they applied the same word — and it stuck.

Now 'savanna' is a scientific ecological term used worldwide for tropical and subtropical grasslands — African savannas, South American cerrado, Australian tropical grasslands.

The Taíno word for a Caribbean landscape now names an ecosystem type found on every continent except Antarctica. It's one of the few indigenous American words to become a scientific universal.