How Did the Turkey Get Its Name? A Case of Mistaken Identity

The guineafowl and the “turkey merchants”

To understand the mix-up, you have to start with a different bird. The helmeted guineafowl is a plump, spotted gamebird from Africa. In the 1500s, guineafowl were among the exotic goods reaching England through merchants who traded with the eastern Mediterranean, then largely controlled by the Ottoman Empire, known to the English simply as “Turkey”.

Goods arriving by that route were often labeled after Turkey, whatever their real origin. So the English called the guineafowl a “turkey-cock” or “turkey-hen”, meaning roughly “the foreign fowl that comes via Turkey”.

How the American bird took the name

At almost the same time, Spanish explorers in Mexico found people keeping a large domesticated bird, the descendant of the wild turkey. They shipped some home, and by the 1520s and 1530s the new bird was being raised in Spain, and soon in France, Italy and England.

To many Europeans, the American bird looked like a larger cousin of the guineafowl. Both were big, ground-dwelling fowl with bare heads, and both were exotic and tasty. English speakers started using the same name, turkey, for both birds, and for several decades writers did not always distinguish between them.

Over time, the two names separated. The African bird became the guineafowl, after the region of Guinea in West Africa, and “turkey” came to mean only the American bird. By then the name was fixed, even though the turkey had nothing to do with Turkey.

The new bird also quickly outshone its namesake at the table. It was larger, meatier and easy to raise, so by the late 1500s turkey was being served at feasts in England, and it later became the centerpiece of Christmas dinners in Britain and Thanksgiving in the United States.

Even scientists kept the confusion

When the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus formally named the wild turkey in 1758, he called it Meleagris gallopavo. Meleagris is the ancient Greek word for guineafowl, and gallopavo combines the Latin gallus (chicken) and pavo (peacock). The scientific name therefore describes the turkey as a “guineafowl chicken-peacock”, a neat record of how Europeans struggled to place the bird.

The comparison with the peacock is not far-fetched. A strutting turkey tom with his tail fanned recalls the display of the Indian peafowl, although the two birds are only distant relatives within the same order.

What other languages call the turkey

English is not alone in giving the bird a misleading name. Many languages connect it with India, because Europeans long called the newly found American lands “the Indies”, after Christopher Columbus’s belief that he had reached Asia; the Caribbean islands are still known as the West Indies.

The Portuguese name is just as wrong as the English one, since turkeys never lived wild in Peru. In each case, people named the bird after the distant, exotic place they believed it came from or the traders who brought it.

Turkeys were domesticated long before Europeans arrived

The bird Europeans met in the 1500s was not wild. Peoples of Mexico and Central America had domesticated the turkey from the South Mexican subspecies at least 2,000 years earlier, keeping it for meat, feathers and ceremonies. The Aztecs raised large numbers, and Spanish accounts describe turkeys sold in their markets.

DNA studies suggest that turkeys were also kept by the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest, probably at first more for their feathers, which were woven into blankets and used in rituals, than for meat. These birds appear to have been domesticated separately from the Mexican stock.

There is a historical irony here. English colonists who settled in New England in the 1600s brought domestic turkeys with them from Europe, birds whose ancestors had left Mexico a century earlier, only to find wild turkeys already living in the forests around them.

Myths about the turkey’s name

Several other explanations are sometimes repeated, but they lack good evidence. One says that the name imitates the bird’s call, a “turk-turk” sound. Another claims it came from a Native American word. Neither is supported by the historical record, which clearly shows “turkey” being used for guineafowl before the American bird reached England.

The bird’s bare red head also gave a name to another species: the turkey vulture, named for its resemblance to a male turkey. In 2022 the country itself asked the United Nations to use its Turkish name, Türkiye, in official English usage, but the bird, of course, kept its familiar name.