Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Buffalo
/ˈbʌfəloʊ/noun
A large wild bovine of Africa or Asia, and loosely the American bison.
The Greek roots
βούβαλος
boúbalos
African antelope
Literally: “the ox-like beast”
Follow a root:βούβαλος1 word
The story of the word
In Greek βούβαλος was an antelope, not an ox at all. Latin bubalus took it over, Late Latin bufalus blurred it toward cattle, and Portuguese traders carried búfalo around the tropics attaching it to whatever large horned animal they met. English pinned it on the American bison in the 1620s, which is zoologically wrong and now beyond correcting.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Portuguese → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
In a sentence
The herd of water buffalo blocked the road for twenty minutes.