#28: Hreindýr

To build upon yesterday's entry on Christmas, today I want to talk about reindeer. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the English word is simply a compound of "rein" and "deer;" after all, they are a type of deer and you can strap reins to them a la Santa Claus. But it turns out that this isn't the case at all. Instead, the word reindeer has Nordic roots, just like its Icelandic cognate hreindýr.

Hreindýr, like so many Icelandic words, is a compound and it's actually quite redundant. It was formed by combining hreinn (the original Old Norse word for "reindeer") with dýr (animal, cf. dýragarður). Thus, it really means "reindeer animal," and although hreinn on its own probably would have sufficed, in modern Icelandic only hreindýr is used to refer to the creature. There is an adjective hreinn in both Old Norse and Icelandic (it means "clean" or "pure"), but it is likely unrelated to hreinn the animal.

The compounding of hreinn + dýr actually predates modern Icelandic, as the word hreindýri is attested in Old Norse. This word is not only the ancestor of the modern Icelandic term, but it was also borrowed into Middle English circa 1400, when its spelling was Anglicized to yield the word "reindeer." Thus, reindeer have nothing to do with reins (that's a word that we borrowed from Old French) and the word is only incidentally related to "deer." The word "deer" is derived from the Old English word dēor ("animal"), which predates the borrowing of hreindýri. Dēor does share the same Proto-Germanic root as the Icelandic/Norse dýr, so it would be inaccurate to say that "deer" and "reindeer" are completely unrelated. However, one is a native English word while the other is a foreign loanword, and "reindeer" is definitely not a compound of "deer." They're just cousins that look like twins.

WORD SUMMARY:

hreindýr, -s, -- (n): reindeer

Posted in: Animals, Compound Words, Nouns