/ɡəˈrɪlə/·noun·1847 CE, Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman, Boston Journal of Natural History·Established
Origin
From a Carthaginian sailor's 500 BCE account of 'wild hairy people' on the West African coast, through two millennia of dormancy in a Greek navigational text, to Thomas Savage's 1847 species description that deliberatelyborrowed the ancient word — making a name for near-human wildness the formal scientific term for our closest great ape relative.
Definition
The largest living primate, a heavily built ground-dwelling great ape (genus Gorilla) native to the forests of equatorial Africa, characterised by black fur, a robust frame, and pronounced sexual dimorphism.
The Full Story
Ancient Greek via Latin19th century CE (coined 1847)well-attested
The word 'gorilla' was introduced into scientific nomenclature by American physician and missionary Thomas Savage, who in 1847 co-authored a paper with Jeffries Wyman in the Boston Journal of Natural Historydescribing a large African ape. Savage chose the name from an ancient Greek source: the Periplus of Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian explorer who sailed the West African coast around 500 BCE. In Hanno's account, preserved in a Greektranslation of the original
Did you know?
When American naturalist Thomas Savage named the gorilla in 1847, he was consciouslyborrowing a word that ancient and medieval readers had interpreted as referring to savage wild humans, not animals. The Victorians wholater used gorilla cartoons to mock Darwin were unwittingly reprising a 2,300-year-old ambiguity: Hanno's original Greek word 'Gorillai' described creatures his interpreters called a tribe of hairy people. The animal and the slur were always the
regarded as a local West African or Phoenician-mediated term, possibly from a Bantu or Mande language of the Guinea coast, though no certain etymology from a specific African language has been
. The term likely meant something like 'hairy people' or 'wild men' in the indigenous tongue Hanno's interpreters used. The word passed directly from this Greek ethnonym into 19th-century zoological Latin as the genus name Gorilla gorilla when Savage formally described the western lowland gorilla. Because 'Gorillai' is not of Indo-European stock, there is no PIE root to reconstruct. The word entered English popular usage rapidly after 1847, aided by Paul du Chaillu's sensationalised 1861 accounts of gorilla hunting in Gabon. Key roots: Gorillai (Γορίλλαι) (Ancient Greek (borrowed from African via Punic): "wild hairy people; an ethnonym applied by Hanno's interpreters to encountered beings on the West African coast"), *gōr- (hypothetical African substrate) (Uncertain West African language: "wild person, hairy being — precise meaning unrecoverable; not Indo-European, no PIE root applicable").