Word of the Week – Reindeer - Roseanna M. White

I love to look at the roots of words and guess where they came from. But with reindeer, that’s a rather dangerous thing to do.

If one were to ask me, I probably would have come up with a (feasible, to my mind) story about how these large deer–big enough to pull a sled or sleigh–are hence big enough for reins, and that they clearly got their name because they’re a deer you can hitch up and use like a horse.

I’d have been wrong.

Turns out, this is a false-cognate. The rein in reindeer is actually from the Norse hreinn, which means “antler,” so called because both male and female reindeer have antlers, though the males are bigger and “truly remarkable,” according to one early source. The more ancient root is linked to the Greek krios, which is where ram also comes from.

The word dates to around the 1400s and refers to the type of deer that inhabit the Arctic regions of Europe.

The root of the word, however, has been much confused over the centuries, given how similar it sounds to other words. In the 1600s, the animals had just come into public awareness in England, and so a bunch of pubs popped up using their name…in a variety of ways. Rain-deer, rained-deer, range-deer, and ranged-deer all are recorded.

But now you know. Really, we’re singing about Rudolph the red-nosed deer with really big antlers. 😉

(Coming home from the Saturday show of Christmas at Sugar Plum Manor in Colorado Springs, we saw a mule deer sauntering lazily down the middle of the road in front of us. We don’t have mule deer on the east coast, and we were in the Christmas spirit, so my mom and I decided that it was one of Santa’s reindeer, out to say hello. She decided it was Comet. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it, even though we of course looked up what it really was, LOL.)