Hehe, I always like these threads!

I'm just gonna copy-paste a post I made on the same subject on another forum, because it's too long

"Kanu" was a word I got off a Lion King fan site in 2002 that listed some random African words and their meanings (so people could use them for their characters, I guess). Kanu supposedly meant "wild cat" and I thought that that had the best meaning. Thus I chose that name for my persona lioness even though I didn't think it sounded that cool, or particularly feminine for that matter, to begin with. (And to this day I haven't seen many other female Kanus... I don't think there are any others I know of in the TLK community.) But I found the name's meaning, rather than how it sounded, to be the most important so I stuck with it and now I could never let it go, haha.

I made my full username "Kanu, the golden lioness", but after about a year I grew too tired of typing out the full name all the time (it is soo loong), so then I ended up with "KanuTGL" and that is the way it has remained since then. Kanu is ten years old now...! I wish I could find out the exact day she was created, but alas, that e-mail history is long gone. I never questioned the name meaning until a couple of years ago either... Turns out that the word "kanu" in Swahili means "genet", not "wild cat" (genets are really cool animals, but still... xD) and that the name Kanu is a male name from India and can mean either "handsome" or something related to some thunder god... Uhm, whoops. But, like I said, I could never let go of it now I don't really know how it's pronounced, but I tend to say "KAH-nu".