Mar 10, 2018
The name jaguar is derived from the Native American word yaguar, which means “he who kills with one leap.”
tauntedoctopuses: It would be nice to know what specific Native American group/language this was from.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, jaguar comes from the Tupi word “jaguara.”
The Tupi were a large indigenous people in Brazil, who lived along the Atlantic coast and parts of the Amazon rainforest. Some of their words made it into Portuguese, including “jaguar,” from which it was borrowed directly into English. Save for a few isolated communities, the Tupi have been wiped out by Portuguese enslavement, European diseases, and ongoing assimilation.
