PawSteps · Animals and words
A hedgehog is a hog that lives in a hedge. Once you notice that names are usually describing something, you start seeing it everywhere — and you also start spotting the ones that are completely wrong.
The most common kind. Somebody looked at an animal, described it, and the description stuck.
A hedge, because that's where it lives and forages, and a hog because of the snout and the grunting, snuffling noise it makes while hunting. It's a name built entirely out of two observations, and it's only about six hundred years old.
"Earth pig" in Afrikaans. It digs into the earth and has a long pig-like snout, which it uses to get at termites. Not remotely related to pigs.
Ancient Greek: hippos, horse, and potamos, river. A river horse. It's actually more closely related to whales than to horses, but you can see how they got there.
It wedges a nut into a crack in bark and hammers it open. "Hatch" here is an old form of "hack". A bird named after a technique.
Probably from the same root as the French dormir, to sleep — a sleeping mouse. They hibernate for around half the year, so it's fair. Not actually a mouse.
A fish that spends much of its life out of water on tidal mud, skipping across it on its front fins. Completely literal.
No notes.
Not what the animal is, but a particular thing it does or a particular look it has.
The folded front legs look like hands pressed together in prayer. They aren't praying. They're waiting, and those legs snap out to catch things.
The loose skin under the throat puffs out and turns black when the lizard is stressed or defending territory. So the name records the animal at its most alarmed — a bit like naming a person after their angry face.
Same idea. It looks fairly ordinary until something frightens it, then it opens a huge umbrella of skin around its neck. The name is of the emergency, not the animal.
The roaring bark, and the thick mane-like fur that mature males grow round the neck.
All named for spiky scales above the eyes that look like long lashes. The crested gecko and the eyelash gecko are the same animal — two nicknames for Correlophus ciliatus, and ciliatus is Latin for fringed with hairs, so even the scientific name is about the eyelashes.
Geckos have no eyelids at all, which is why they lick their own eyes to clean them. The eyelashes are decoration, in a manner of speaking.
The usual story is that the long black feathers sticking out of the back of its head look like the quill pens nineteenth-century clerks tucked behind their ears.
It might not be true. Another explanation traces the name through French from an Arabic phrase meaning hunter bird, which only later got heard as "secretary". Both are still argued over — so this is a good example of an origin story that's too neat to trust completely.
Somebody guessed, the guess stuck, and now we're all committed to it.
Not a whale. The largest species of dolphin. Old whalers called them "whale killers" because they watched them hunt whales, and over time the two words swapped places into "killer whale". A name that's wrong and back to front.
Wrong twice. It cannot fly — it glides. And it isn't a lemur; lemurs live in Madagascar and these live in South East Asia. Its proper name is the colugo, and oddly enough its closest living relatives are primates, so it's more related to you than to a lemur.
Neither a bear nor a cat. It's related to civets. Its actual claim to fame is that it smells strongly of hot buttered popcorn — because it produces the same chemical that gives popcorn its smell.
A rodent, not a dog. Named for living on the prairies and for the sharp barking alarm call it makes to warn the colony.
Not a pig, and not from Guinea. They're rodents from the Andes. Nobody is entirely sure where either half of the name came from.
Not a bear. A marsupial. "Bear" got attached by Europeans who thought it looked like one, and it has been quietly dropped from careful writing ever since.
It's bright green. It's named White. And its scientific name, Litoria caerulea, means blue.
The "White" is John White, a naval surgeon who described the frog in Australia in 1790. The "blue" is the good part: the usual explanation is that the preservative he shipped the specimen in stripped the yellow pigment out of the skin, so by the time it reached London the frog had turned blue, and that's the colour it got named for. A frog named after two things it isn't.
Keepers also call them dumpy tree frogs, because older ones develop heavy folds of fat over the eyes.
Named after Georg Wilhelm Steller, who described this enormous relative of the dugong in 1741. It's remembered mainly because it was hunted to extinction within about 27 years of Europeans first recording it.
After Joseph Thomson, a Scottish explorer. You'll also find a story that he was nicknamed for bounding about Africa the way the gazelles do — that's a good anecdote and probably not much more than that, so enjoy it and don't repeat it as fact.
From Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The usual translation is something like "water monster" — atl meaning water. It's also linked to Xolotl, an Aztec god associated with fire and lightning, who in one story escaped being sacrificed by turning himself into a salamander.
So depending on which telling you follow, the animal on every child's pencil case is either a water monster or a god in hiding.
Here's the one worth knowing. "Urchin" is an old English word for hedgehog — Shakespeare uses "urchins" and "hedgepigs" in his plays.
Which means a sea urchin is a sea hedgehog. Somebody looked at a spiny ball on the seabed and named it after the spiny ball in the hedge. And when "urchin" later came to mean a ragged street child, it was the same idea travelling again: small, bristling, and out at night.
A baby hedgehog. Hog plus a little ending that means small — the same one in piglet, droplet and booklet.
The other name for the African pygmy hedgehog, the one kept as a pet. It has one fewer toe on its back feet than our wild European hedgehog, which has five. Two animals told apart by a footprint — and the name records exactly that.
Very long ears, which work as radiators to shed heat in a hot dry climate. As with most of this page: somebody looked, and said what they saw.
It's also a decent reminder that the name of a thing isn't the same as knowing the thing. Plenty of people can say "African pygmy hedgehog" and have no idea it can't hibernate.