Turkey what was it called

There is an African bird called the guinea fowl. It has dark feathers with white spots and a patch of brown on the back of its neck. Portuguese traders brought the guinea fowl to Europe through North Africa. This foreign bird came to Europe through Turkish lands. When Europeans came to North America, they saw a bird that looked like the guinea fowl. This bird was native to the North American continent.

Orin Hargraves is a lexicographer, someone who writes dictionaries. Hargraves explains what happened. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Turkeys are native to North America, so it's something of an etymological puzzle that they've come to have the same name as a Eurasian nation. Indeed, it appears that the use of the term "turkey" for poultry was the result, mainly, of European explorers' confusing it with another bird:. Not a turkey. This is a guinea fowl. It's in the same taxonomic family as turkeys and chickens Galliformes but it's native to sub-Saharan Africa. As Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky explains , they were reintroduced to Europe in the 15th century: "Collecting exotic animals was a hobby of Renaissance princes and the wealthy, and guinea fowl appeared in their royal parks and private menageries.

The Mamluk Sultanate, which controlled Egypt and modern-day Israel and Lebanon at this point, served as a supplier. The Mamluks were ethnically Turkish most were from the Caucasus , and the birds became known as "galinias turcicas" or "Turkish chickens. The forests of the northeast were already populated with wild turkeys, but the forerunner of the turkey that we roast is the European-bred-but-originally-Mexican bird.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. What to Know Turkeys , the bird closely associated with Thanksgiving, were first encountered by the Spanish in Mexico.

More Words At Play. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Oct. Merriam-Webster's Words of the Week - Nov. Time Traveler. Some Indian dialects, however, use the word piru or peru , the latter being how the Portuguese refer to the American fowl, which is not native to Peru but might have become popular in Portugal as Spanish and Portuguese explorers conquered the New World.

Then there are the turkey truthers and linguistic revisionists. On December 13, , Rabbi Harold M. Its binomial nomenclature, Meleagris gallopavo , is a hodgepodge. The first name comes from a Greek myth in which the goddess Artemis turned the grieving sisters of the slain Meleager into guinea fowls.