The Etymology of Igloo
Igloo is a famous example of a borrowed word that English narrowed in the act of borrowing. In Inuktitut, the language of the eastern Canadian Inuit, iglu simply means house — any dwelling, regardless of material. A wooden cabin is an iglu; a modern apartment is an iglu; the famous domed snow-block shelter is technically an iglu-vigaq, a snow-house. When 19th-century Arctic explorers first encountered the snow shelters and asked the locals what they were called, they were given the general word iglu and assumed it referred to that specific type of structure. The narrow English sense entered the language in 1856 with John Rae's Arctic narratives and has stuck ever since. The same Eskimo-Aleut root *ǝŋlu (house) gives Greenlandic illu and Aleut ula. Two further unrelated igloo borrowings (the bee igloo, the dog igloo) are 20th-century commercial coinages.