Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Hippopotamus
/ˌhɪpəˈpɑtəməs/noun
A massive semi-aquatic African mammal with a barrel body and enormous jaws.
The Greek roots
ἵππος
híppos
horse
ποταμός
potamós
river
Literally: “river horse”
The story of the word
Herodotus wrote it as two words, the horse of the river, describing an animal Greeks knew only from the Nile. The naming is charitable, since the creature's nearest relatives are whales rather than horses. ἵππος gallops through English in hippodrome, in the seahorse-shaped hippocampus in the brain, and in every Philip, a lover of horses.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
hippodromehippocampusPhilipMesopotamia
In a sentence
The hippopotamus surfaced twice, blew, and went under before anyone got a photograph.