The orangutan carries one of the most poetic names in the animal kingdom. It comes from Malay orang hutan, literally person of the forest, a name that recognizes the uncanny human-likeness of these great apes and has been borrowed into virtually every European language unchanged. But the story behind this naming is more complex and culturally fraught than the simple translation suggests.
In Malay, orang means person or human being. It is the standard, everyday word for a human. Hutan means forest, jungle, or uncultivated land. The compound orang hutan thus means, unambiguously, a person who lives in the forest. And that is precisely what the term originally referred to in Malay: not an ape, but indigenous forest-dwelling human populations, the semi-nomadic peoples
European naturalists who visited Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century encountered references to orang hutan and apparently misidentified the referent, applying the term to the great ape rather than to the forest peoples the Malays were describing. Or perhaps the confusion was not accidental: some scholars suggest that Europeans, influenced by the Great Chain of Being and contemporary debates about the boundaries between human and animal, found it useful to apply a word meaning forest person to a creature that seemed to blur those boundaries.
The earliest European descriptions of the orangutan in English date to the 1690s. The Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius provided an early account, and the word entered English in various spellings: orang-outang, orang-utan, orangutan. The hyphenated forms preserve the two-word Malay original, while the modern unhyphenated form treats it as a single English word.
The spelling orang-outang, which was standard for centuries, reflects a misheard or dialectal pronunciation of hutan as utan or utang. Some Malay dialects do use utan rather than hutan, and the aspirated h at the beginning of hutan may have been lost in transmission. Modern English has largely settled on orangutan, though orang-utan is still used in British English.
Orangutans are found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, where they inhabit tropical and subtropical rainforests. They are the most arboreal of the great apes, spending most of their lives in the forest canopy and building elaborate sleeping nests each night in the treetops. Their long arms, which can span over two meters, and their hand-like feet are superbly adapted for moving through the canopy.
The name forest person is more apt than its coiners could have known. Orangutans are among the most intelligent of all animals. They use tools, including sticks to extract insects from tree holes and large leaves as umbrellas. They have demonstrated the ability to learn sign language and to understand
The orangutan has three recognized species: the Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), and the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis), described as a separate species only in 2017. All three are critically endangered, threatened primarily by deforestation driven by palm oil plantations, logging, and agricultural expansion. The Tapanuli orangutan, with fewer than eight hundred individuals remaining, is the rarest great ape on Earth.
The word orang appears in several other Malay-derived terms in English. Orang laut (sea people) refers to the maritime nomadic peoples of the Malay Archipelago. The word orang itself ultimately derives from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and has cognates across the Austronesian language family.
There is a melancholy irony in the name person of the forest being attached to a species that is losing its forest at an alarming rate. Borneo has lost more than half its forest cover since the 1970s, and Sumatra's deforestation rate is among the highest in the world. The orangutan, the forest person, is running out of forest. The name that once described an abundance, a vast forested world populated by human-like beings, now serves as a reminder of what is being destroyed