Baleen
/bəˈliːn/noun
The fringed horny plates hanging from a whale's upper jaw, used to strain food from seawater.
The Greek roots
Literally: “whale”
The story of the word
The strainer is named after the animal. Latin balaena, itself borrowed from Greek φάλαινα, came through French baleine into English, where it first meant the whale and only later the material in its mouth. Corset makers and umbrella makers kept a trade going for centuries under the misnomer whalebone, which is not bone but keratin, the stuff of fingernails. The Greek word may be connected to φαλλός on the idea of something swollen, but that is an old suggestion rather than a settled one.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
A single blue whale carries several hundred baleen plates on each side of its jaw.
Museum drawers full of baleen still smell faintly of the sea.