The animal is the word derived from the latin word ‘
anima’, which means ‘breath’ or ‘soul’.
Here, we are depicting the real stories behind the names of some animal how they are derived:
- Penguin
No one is entirely aware about why Penguins are called as Penguins. The word Penguin is a corruption of the word
pen gwyn, which means ‘white head’. The Penguins is the great auk, an enormous flightless black-and-white seabird of the North Atlantic, and it's presumed that sailors to the South Atlantic either confused the flightless black-and-white seabirds they saw there for auks, or just used the same word for both creatures.
- Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros means ‘horned-nose’. The ‘Rhino’ word is the same fragment of word ‘Rhinoplasty’, which means the medical treatment of nose. The word ‘ceros’ is the same fragment of the word ‘triceratops’, which means tough, fibrous protein that is a building part of hairs, nails and rhino horns as well.
- Ostrich
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
Hippopotamus is a Greek word for ‘River horse’. As it certainly lives in a river and it looks more like a horse, too.
- Tiger
The word tiger came from the ancient Greek language word ‘
tighri’, which means ‘arrow’ or ‘a sharp object’. Tigers are nothing but a sharp animals of a cat family.
- Cheetah
It has been derived from the word ‘Chita’, which is a hindi word for ‘Leopard’, which probably came from the Sanskrit word which means ‘spotted’.
- Anaconda
The anaconda’s name is a lot harder to explain. Although anaconda are only found in South America, it’s likely that the name was brought there from elsewhere. One likely theory claims that it might once have referred to an enormous snake of south East Asia that was known by a Tamil name,
anaikkonda, literally meaning “having killed an elephant.”
- Tortoise
No one is entirely sure why tortoises are called
tortoises, although it’s fair to say that none of the theories we have to choose from is particularly flattering. On the one hand,
tortoise might be a derivative of a Latin word,
tartaruchus, literally meaning “of the underworld.” On the other, it might come from the Latin
tortus, meaning “twisted” (which is also where the adjective
tortuous derives from). The actual Latin name for the tortoise,
testudo, was much simpler, however: it simply means “shelled.”
