The etymology of “penguin”
Where does the word “penguin” come from? French, Welsh, or Latin?
The penguins of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Australian territories near Antarctica, have been slapped with 10% tariffs by Trump. The internet is reeling with the injustice of it all, and I’ve been summoned to bring all my linguistics skills to bear in aiding the hapless penguins:
Let it never be said that Linguistic Discovery is not a defender of the people. And penguins.
So, like the penguins, let’s dive in.
First, as pointed out in the Threads post, the French word pingouin doesn’t refer to penguins. It refers to a similar-looking bird of the northern hemisphere called the auk. (Auks and penguins are not part of the same family of species. Auks live in the northern hemisphere, while penguins live in the southern hemisphere.)
The word for ‘penguin’ in French is manchot, literally ‘no-armed’, from the Latin mancus ‘maimed, crippled, handicapped’.
Why the discrepancy between the English and the French meanings of penguin/pingouin? Because the English word used to refer to the ‘auk’ too! The word waddled its way into French (after nesting with Dutch for a bit) before the shift in meaning.
Why did the English word penguin change its meaning? For starters, the great auks of Newfoundland, who were the original bearers of the name penguin, went extinct by 1844. Secondly, British sailors likely just applied the name penguin to the similar-looking Antarctic birds when they first encountered them.
If French got the word from English, then where did the English word penguin come from?
