Cairns is a city and port on the north-east coast of Australia, in the state of Queensland. It is a tropical place — hot, often wet — and many travellers use it as the jump-off point for the Great Barrier Reef and the rainforest nearby. In everyday English the name is a place-name only; you fly into Cairns, stay in Cairns, leave from Cairns. It is not a common word for anything else. The city takes a Scottish family name: in Scots a cairn is a man-made heap of stones, and that word became a surname for someone linked with such a mound. The same English spelling also covers an Irish family name from Ó Ciaráin (the source of Kieran and Kearns), which people have sometimes mixed together with the Scottish one. The Queensland city is the Scottish name on the map. Spoken English usually makes it one short sound, a bit like “kens”, not “cay-urns”.