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- ARCTIC. Most bodies of water are named for the areas they surround or the areas that surround them. For example, the Arctic Ocean was named because of its location in the Arctic Circle—which begs the question, how did the Arctic Circle get its name?
- ATLANTIC. The first documented usage of the term “Atlantic” was in the sixth century BC by a Greek poet, Atlantikôi pelágei or the “Sea of Atlas.” In Greek mythology, Atlas is the Titan tasked with holding up the heavens for all eternity.
- INDIAN. The Indian Ocean has been known as such since at least 1515 and is another example of an ocean being named by the area that surrounds it. Earlier accounts named it the Eastern Ocean and Ancient Greece referred to the northwestern Indian ocean as the Erythraean Sea or the Red Sea, likely referring to seasonal blooms of cyanobacteria near the water’s surface turning the normal green-blue water a reddish brown.
- PACIFIC. The Pacific Ocean or Mare Pacificum, meaning “peaceful sea,” was dubbed so by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 after his treacherous journey to find the “Spice Islands”, now known as the Malaku Islands in eastern Indonesia.
- Penguin
- Albatross
- Rhinoceros
- Ostrich
- Hippopotamus
- Raccoon
- Moose
- Tiger
- Leopard
- Cheetah
No one is entirely sure why penguins are called “penguins” (not helped by the fact that they were once called “arsefeet”), but the best theory we have is that penguin is a corruption of the Welsh pen gwyn, literally “white head.” The name pen gwyn originally applied to the great auk, an enormous flightless black-and-white seabird of the North Atlan...
This is a strange one: In the 16th century, the Arabic word for a sea eagle, al-ghattas, was borrowed into Spanish and became the Spanish word for a pelican, alcatraz (which is where the island with the prison gets its name). Alcatraz was then borrowed into English and became albatross in the late 17th century—but at each point in history, the word...
Rhinoceros literally means “nose-horned.” The rhino– part is the same as in words like rhinoplasty, the medical name for a nose job, while the –ceros part is the same root found in words like triceratops and keratin, the tough, fibrous protein that makes up our hair and nails and rhino horns.
The English word ostrich is a corruption of the Latin avis struthio—avis meaning “bird” and struthio being the Latin word for the ostrich itself. In turn, struthio comes from the Greek name for the ostrich, strouthos meagle, which literally means“big sparrow.”
Hippopotamus literally means “river horse” in Greek. It might not look much like a horse, but it certainly lives in rivers—and let’s be honest, a hippolook more like a horse than an ostrich looks like a sparrow.
Raccoon is derived from an Algonquin word that means “he scratches with his hands.” Before that was adopted into English, raccoonswere known as “wash-bears” (and still are in several other languages, including Dutch and German), which refers to their perceived habit of washing their food before eating it.
Moose, too, is thought to be an Algonquin word, meaning “he strips it off,” a reference to the animal’s fondness for tearing bark off trees.
Our word tiger goes all the way back to Ancient Greek, but the Greeks had borrowed the word from Asia, and it’s a mystery where the word actually originated. One theory is that it comes from tighri, a word from Avestan (an ancient Iranian language) that means “arrow” or “sharp object,” but that’s only conjecture. Speaking of big cats…
Confusingly, leopard literally means “lion-panther” or “lion-leopard.” Variations of the word pard have been used to mean “leopard” or “panther” since the days of Ancient Greek, while leon was the Greek, and eventually Latin, word for a lion. The word lionitself, meanwhile, is so old that its origins probably lie in the impossibly ancient languages...
It derives from chita, which is the Hindi word for “leopard” and probably comes from a Sanskrit wordliterally meaning “spotted.”
Their name might come from Phoenician afar "dust”. Greek aphrike (*ἀφρίκη) "without cold". This was proposed by historian Leo Africanus (1488-1554), who suggested the Greek word phrike (φρίκη, meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix "a-", thus indicating a land free of cold and horror.
Dec 16, 2016 · Sometimes the names get a little bit more abstract. Take the tragus, a tiny flap of skin on the outer ear. It's named after goats not because it looks like them, but because some people have tufts ...
Nov 11, 2021 · One theory is that it’s from the Akkadian word erebu, meaning “to set in the west,” because Europe was to the west of that other continent, Asia. Another more common idea is that it combines the Greek words eurys (“broad”) and ops (“face”), because the continent represented the broad face on which humankind walked.
Jun 20, 2018 · This name comes from the word Ἀσία’ from Ancient Greek. Initially, it was used to refer to the eastern bank of the Aegean Sea but was later used to refer to the region of Anatolia. Before its extensive use, the Romans used it to refer to the Lydian area. The deeper meaning could have been from the Aegean word “Asis” meaning muddy or ...
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The Greeks (Greek: Έλληνες) have been identified by many ethnonyms. The most common native ethnonym is Hellene (Ancient Greek: Ἕλλην), pl. Hellenes (Ἕλληνες); the name Greeks (Latin: Graeci) was used by the ancient Romans and gradually entered the European languages through its use in Latin. The mythological patriarch ...
