Kangaroo Is a Real Word, Not a Polite Shrug

Picture a quiet river mouth on the coast of north-east Australia in the winter of 1770. A wooden sailing ship lies tilted on the sand for repairs, and on the grassy bank a big grey animal sits up on its long back legs, watching the visitors with polite interest. The sailors had never seen anything like it, and before long they had a name for it. That name has since hopped into English, Russian and Spanish alike: kangaroo, kenguru, canguro.

The story everyone tells

You have probably heard the tale. The visitors point at the strange animal and ask a local man what it is called. He shrugs and answers kangaroo, which is supposed to mean I don't understand you, and the newcomers happily write it down as the animal's name. It is a charming story about two sides missing each other completely, and it turns up in quiz books, classrooms and dinner conversations all over the world.

What people often get wrong

The story is simply not true. The river is the one now called the Endeavour River, near today's Cooktown in Queensland, and the people who lived there spoke Guugu Yimidhirr. In that language gangurru is a perfectly ordinary word: the name of one particular animal, the large black or grey kangaroo. The Macquarie Dictionary notes that it is one of at least eight names the language has for different kinds of kangaroo, much as English speakers tell a pony from a carthorse.

The visitors did make a mistake, just not the famous one. According to the Australian National Dictionary Centre, they took the name of one kind of kangaroo and used it for all of them. So the word did change its meaning on its way into English, only in a far less dramatic direction than the story claims.

What the notebooks really say

The crew kept careful journals, and the dates survive. The expedition's botanist wrote the word Kanguru in his journal on 12 July 1770, and on 4 August the captain described the animal as called by the local people Kangooroo or Kanguru. By the time the first settlers sailed for Sydney, kangaroo was already an English word.

1. 12 July 1770 Kanguru appears in the botanist's journal
2. 4 August 1770 The captain writes down Kangooroo or Kanguru
3. 1788 Settlers in Sydney use the word, but the local people there do not know it
4. 1820 A later visitor records a different word, and doubt begins
5. 1898 A researcher notes that gang-oo-roo does mean kangaroo
6. 1972 A linguist begins the work that records gangurru again

Why the myth hung on

So where did the shrug come from? The Macquarie Dictionary traces it to 1820, when a later ship's captain visited the same river and made his own word list. It matched the first one in almost everything except the animal: he was given menuah, probably minha, a general word for any animal that is good to eat. Two lists, two different answers, and people began to wonder whether the first visitors had been teased. Meanwhile the settlers in Sydney had tried the word on the Dharug people, who spoke a different language, had never heard it, and took kangaroo to be an English word.

The truth waited patiently. A researcher pointed out in 1898 that gang-oo-roo really did mean kangaroo, but hardly anyone noticed. Only after 1972, when a linguist working with Guugu Yimidhirr speakers heard gangurru again, did the tale begin to fade. So the next time someone tells you the shrug story, you can answer, very kindly, that you understand perfectly.