Pygmy

The story of the word

πυγμή was a unit of length, elbow to knuckle, roughly thirty-five centimetres, and Homer's Πυγμαῖοι were a legendary people that tall who fought an annual war against migrating cranes. Herodotus and centuries of travellers went looking for them, and the name was fastened onto real Central African peoples in the nineteenth century, which is why most of them reject it. Latin pugnus, the same fist, gives English "pugilist", so a boxer and a pygmy are cousins at a distance.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → English

First recorded

14th century