1124: caterpillar Jan 6, 2018

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Yesterday it was discussed here how the words for 'dolphin' and 'caterpillar' in Old English translate to 'sea-pig' and 'leaf-worm' respectively. In Modern English, their names may sound more elegant, or perhaps at least less semantically blunt, but it is not as though words like that, now replaced with terms derived from Romance languages, don't have ay meanings. The word 'caterpillar', for instance, is from Old French, and the predominant theory on its etymology states that it comes from the word 'chatepelose'. That may still sound more exotic to you than 'leaf-worm' (lēafwyrm in the original Old English), but it translates to 'hairy cat'. The connection to cats is present in other languages as well, such as 'Teufelskatz' in Switzerdeutsch meaning ‘devil's cat’ or in Lombard where the word for 'caterpillar' is the same as the word for cat. You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

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