this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Without doubt, the turkey. Buckle up, it's a wild ride: The North American bird is named after the Eurasian country because it reminded settlers from Europe of an African bird, the guinea fowl. Allegedly, they called the guinea fowl "turkey fowl" because it was first imported to Europe through Turkey.
That'd be crazy enough, if it stopped there The French call it dinde, as in d'Inde, or Indian fowl, because it came from a land originally confused with India. The Dutch, though, call it kalkoen, which derives from "fowl of Calicut," which is a city in India now called Kozhikode. Lots of other languages use a derivation of this word. Apparently, they got turkeys from India after Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. I say Americas, because the Portuguese name is perΓΊ, a South American name that they used to refer to Spanish settlements in the Americas, generally. The Spanish, on the other hand, call the bird pavo, derived from the Latin word for peafowl, which actually are from India.
Germans, at least, call it Truthuhn, or Pute, onomatopoetic names based on the birds' calls.
That is wild lmao thank you for this post. One of my favorite bits of etymology trivia is the phrase "comparing apples to oranges" which means a false or meaningless comparison. But in fact while we call them oranges now, they were once called apples of the orange tree and the orange tree was named before the word orange became the name of the color and then the fruit.
So in a round about way the phrase sort of takes on the opposite of its colloquial meaning.
The Turkish name for the bird is "hindi" which means Indian since it came from India.
Every moment of this was a fresh hot take.
We really ought to pick one of these names to start calling them:
https://www.birdful.org/what-did-native-americans-call-turkeys/
I'd be partial to the Muscogee word because I'm from the Southeast (and because it starts with 't'), but it doesn't seem like it has enough vowels so I have no idea how to pronounce it.