How to pronounce rousseau

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Save This Word! An eighteenth-century French philosopher; one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment. He held that in the state of nature, people are good, but that they are corrupted by social institutions; this notion became a central idea of romanticism.

Originally, the French people were known only by a single name. The name Rousseau is a nickname type of surname for a person with red hair or a ruddy complexion. Tracing the origin of the name further, we found the name Rousseau was originally derived from the Old French word “rous,” meaning “red.”