How the turkey got its name

Turkey birds are not from Turkey the country. They got their name because trade is global. Read on…

This week, America will feast on a Thanksgiving meal, which nearly always includes a turkey. Historically the celebration dates back to 1621, when European settlers in New England marked the harvest by having a similar meal.

The centerpiece is the roast turkey. Turkeys are native to the United States and Mexico; in fact, Europeans only first came into contact with turkeys roughly 500 years ago, upon discovery of the New World. So how did the bird turkeys end up with a name like the country Turkey?

Turkeys were domesticated in Mexico. The Aztecs, for example, had a name for the turkey, wueh-xōlō-tl (guajolote in Spanish), a word still used in modern Mexico in addition to the general term pavo.

There are quite a few theories for the derivation of the name “turkey”.

One theory is that when Europeans first encountered turkeys in America, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl, which were already being imported into Europe by Turkey merchants via Constantinople and were therefore nicknamed Turkey coqs. The name of the North American bird thus became “turkey fowl” or “Indian turkeys”, which was then shortened to…