On the last Thursday of every November, millions of American families get together and eat a huge meal. It’s called Thanksgiving, and was originally celebrated by the Pilgrims in honor of their first harvest in 1621. It didn’t become a regular holiday in the United States until the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln called for a day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens” on the last Thursday of November in 1863.
One of the hallmarks of the Thanksgiving meal is a roasted turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), a large bird native to the New World. But why is it called a “turkey”? Does it have anything to do with the country of the same name?
Sort of, yes. Europeans have eaten guineafowl for centuries. These are large birds native to West Africa (which is where Guinea is, and where the gold came from that the British later minted into gold coins also called Guineas). But the English never hunted the birds themselves. The birds were captured in Africa and shipped to Turkey, where merchants sold them on to customers in central Europe. Because they “came from Turkey”, the English called the birds “Turkey fowl” (or “Turkey hen” or “Turkey cock”, if you wanted to be specific).
So when explorers arrived in North America, they saw these huge birds and called them “Turkey fowl”, and later on, just “turkeys”. Although they were wrong – guineafowl and American turkeys are totally different birds – the name stuck.
But it wasn’t just the English who got it wrong. The bird is called turcaí in Irish and twrci in Welsh, both borrowing from the English “turkey”. And in Armenia, Catalonia, France and Israel they’re called “Indian chickens” (as in “India”, not “Native American”). This is also hinted at in Malta, Poland and Turkey, where the bird’s names have allusions to India (in fact, Turks call them hindi).
In Dutch, the word for turkey is kalkoen, meaning “from Calicut” (Calcutta). Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish and Estonian use some variant of the Dutch, like kalkun, kalkúnn, or kalkon. And, thanks to colonialism, it’s also the word used in Papiamento, the native language of the Lesser Antilles, especially Aruba and Curaçao.
