How “jaguar” the cat—and car—got their names

This Thanksgiving week, the animal I have on my mind isn’t the turkey. The word for that bird, as I’ve explored before, indeed takes its name from the country Turkey. 

No, it’s an animal that, along with many of us this holiday, would very well eat a turkey—and perhaps have, as they are both native to the Americas. 

It’s the jaguar.

Recently, Jaguar, the upscale car brand, rolled out a rebrand that caused a lot of growling—but not a little purring—among observers.

So, naturally, incorrigibly, I got to wondering: Why do we call it a jaguar, and how did the car come to be named for this wild cat?

Jaguar: native cat, colonial dog

The word jaguar has been captive in English since at least the early 1600s, translated around that time from accounts by Jesuits missioned as part of Portugal’s colonization of Brazil.

Portuguese rendered as jaguar native names for the great cat in a family of indigenous languages, known as Tupi-Guarani. Two languages among them are especially prominent. The first is Tupinamba—or Old Tupi, extinct but once prevalent along the southern coast of Brazil. The second is Guarani, still extant in and around Paraguay, where it is an official language.

According to Eduardo de Almeida Navarro in his extraordinary Dictionary of Old Tupi, the Tupinamba word for jaguar was, before colonization, îagûara, pronounced not dissimilarly to the American English jaguar. Colonization introduced a number of domesticated animals—including the dog, to which Tupians extended the name îagûara. This extension may have been of little reach, however, as îagûara was already used in the names of some other carnivores. 

After colonization, Tupians also suffixed the adjective eté, meaning “true, genuine,” to îagûara to distinguish it from the newly come canid, yielding îagûareté, or “true jaguar.” Similarly, the word tapi’ira—name for and source of the word tapir—was lent to the colonizers’ oxen, resulting in tapi’iraeté, “true tapir,” among other examples.

English words descended from Tupi

Old Tupi lives on in a number of other loanwords that passed into English via Portuguese as well as Spanish and French, parlance of other colonial powers in South America. 

Here are just some notable examples:

• buccaneer
• capoeira
• capybara
• cashew
• cayenne
• piranha
• tapioca
• toucan

You’ll note most of these words name plants and animals. Indeed, when cultures come into contact, words for new and unfamiliar plants and animals—for food, material technologies, forms of culture—are often chief among their linguistic transmissions.

Incredibly, buccaneer is ultimately rooted in the Old Tupi moka’ẽ, a type of grill over which meat was slowly roasted. (The full story is worthy of its own Mash.)

Jaguar the car got its very name as a rebrand

The company that became Jaguar, the luxury carmaker, started in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company in Blackpool, England. They started out producing motorcycle sidecars but soon after entered into the business of building coaches. 

The company reformed as SS Cars, debuting its first Jaguar model in 1935: the SS Jaguar 2.5 liter Saloon. It chose the name Jaguar, as official history goes, because its “sleek, low-slung” design bore a “feline grace and elegance” balanced with “power and agility”—just like the cat, the makers felt. 

(Perhaps it helped that one of the founders of the Swallow Sidecar Company, and who created SS Cars as part of buying out his partner, was named Williams Lyons.)

In the 1940s, SS had become effectively synonymous with the Nazi secret police. SS Cars rebranded under the marque of Jaguar. That’s a rebrand I think we can all get behind. 

Aftermash

Today in Brazil, the usual word for jaguar in Portuguese is onça, which is related to the English ounce, a name for the snow leopard, as well as to the Latin scientific species name of the jaguar, Panthera onca. Etymologically, however, the onça and ounce are lynxes. 

They derive from the Italian lonza, either directly or via Latin from the Greek λύγξ (lúnx), ultimate source of the English lynx. Lonza passed into Old French as lonce, but that latter language later apparently mistook the initial l in lonza as the definite article, le, resulting in once.

There are many more cat-related etymologies prowling my archives. For more, start with:

• 10 Catty Etymologies for International Cat Day
• Lions, chameleons, and shih-tzus, oh my!: 12 “lion” etymologies