Commando: The British Army named its… | etymologist.ai
commando
/kəˈmɑːndoʊ/·noun·1834 in English, recorded in accounts of Boer frontier warfare in the Cape Colony; entered mainstream British usage during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) as British journalists and soldiers adopted the Afrikaans military term.·Established
Origin
From Latin mandare (to entrust) through Portuguese colonial administration and Afrikaner frontier militias, 'commando' reachedEnglish via the Boer Wars, when British forces borrowed the word from the very fighters whose guerrilla tactics they would later emulate.
Definition
A soldier trained for rapid, stealthy raids behind enemy lines, from Afrikaans kommando (raiding unit), itself from Portuguese 'commando' (a military command), derived via Vulgar Latin *commandare from Latin com- (together) + mandare (to entrust, order).
The Full Story
AfrikaansLate 17th centurywell-attested
The word 'commando' entered Englishdirectly from Afrikaans during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), where it described the guerrilla fighting units of the Boer settlers in South Africa. The Afrikaans term derived from Portuguese 'commando' (a command, or a body of troops under command), which itself came from the verb 'commandar' (to command). Portuguese was the dominant colonial and trading language on the African coasts from the 15th century onward, and Afrikaans absorbed substantial Portuguese vocabulary through Dutch colonial contact. The Dutch settlers (Boers) adopted the Portuguese military organisational term to describe their mounted
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The British Army named its elite WWII raidingforces 'Commandos' as a direct tribute to the Boer fighters who had humiliated them forty years earlier — making 'commando' one of the few words that a nation adopted from a recently defeated enemy specifically to honour the effectiveness of their tactics. Churchill personally championed the name.
, later to order), a compound of 'com-' (together, with) and 'mandare' (to entrust, to order). 'Mandare' itself derives from PIE *man- (hand) combined with *dō- (to give), giving a root sense of 'to put into someone's hand'. The Indo-European lineage is thus unbroken from PIE through Latin and Portuguese, but the specific route into English was colonial and lateral: Portuguese → Afrikaans → British military English via the Boer War. The British adopted the term with admiration for Boer tactics, and by World War II the word had been repurposed to name elite Allied raiding forces. Key roots: *man- (Proto-Indo-European: "hand"), *dō- (Proto-Indo-European: "to give"), mandare (Classical Latin: "to entrust, to order — compound of hand + give"), commando (Portuguese: "military command; a body of troops under orders").