/njuː/ or /nuː/·noun·1777 — Georg Forster, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, written as 'gnoo'. Forster encountered the animal and its name during Cook's stop at the Cape of Good Hope in March 1775. The word arrived in English via Cape Dutch colonial contact with Khoikhoi-speaking peoples of southern Africa.·Established
Origin
The word 'gnu' is a Khoikhoi name for the wildebeest, borrowed by Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century, stripped of its click consonant, adopted into English natural history, and locked into scientific Latin — a colonial phonological reduction that became permanent.
Definition
A large African antelope (genus Connochaetes) with a broad muzzle, curvedhorns, and a tufted tail, whose name derives from the Khoikhoi word ǁnû via Dutch colonial transmission.
The Full Story
Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe) / SanPre-colonial southern Africa; entered European record c. 1775–1777well-attested
The word 'gnu' originates from the indigenous Khoisan languages of southern Africa, specifically from Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe) and closely related San (Bushman) speech communities. The Khoikhoi form is recorded as t'gnu, while the San — particularly Southern Bushman dialects — preserve the form !nu: (the ! representing a postalveolar click, the : indicating vowel length). Both forms are likely related to, or identical with, the Khoikhoi and San root ǂnû meaning 'black', suggesting the name originally referred specifically to the black wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou) rather than the blue. The Khoisan languages are among the most ancient attested human languages, with archaeological evidence placing
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The original Khoikhoi word began with a click consonant — a sound European scribes had no way to write. When Dutch settlerstranscribed it as 'gnu', they silently amputated half the phonology. That truncated spelling then became the official Linnaean species epithet 'gnou', meaning a mispronunciation is now permanently enshrined in the scientific name of an entire genus. Every biology textbook in the world carries the ghost of a sound that was lost at the
cluster with the digraph 'gn'. The word reached written English in 1777 through German-Polish naturalist Georg Forster (1754–1794), who accompanied Captain James Cook on his second
(1772–1775). When Cook's expedition stopped at Table Bay (Cape of Good Hope) in March 1775, Forster encountered the animal and its local name. His published account — A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777) — rendered the name as 'gnoo', channelling the Dutch Cape Colony usage. English then simplified the spelling to 'gnu'. The word is a borrowing, not a cognate: there is no genetic relationship between Khoisan and any European or Semitic language family; the word was copied wholesale from its African source, with European orthography approximating but inevitably distorting the original click phonology. Key roots: ǂnû (Khoikhoi / San (Khoisan): "black; applied to the black wildebeest"), !nu: (Southern Bushman (San): "wildebeest; click-initial root, the ! denoting a postalveolar click"), t'gnu (Khoikhoi (Khoekhoe): "wildebeest; the Khoikhoi herders' name for the animal, likely derived from or related to ǂnû").