# moose/elk in Br.Eng.



## Hans Molenslag

Hi, according to a handful of dictionaries I consulted, both 'moose' and 'elk' are used in British English to refer the same well-known large species of deer (_Alces alces_).

How frequent are both words in present-day British English? In BBC nature documentaries and the like, I've always heard 'moose'. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard anybody say 'elk' (apart from North Americans referring to a different species). Am I right to conclude that 'moose' is far more current nowadays? Is 'elk' still used at all, in British English that is?

Secondly, I've read somewhere that British speakers supposedly use 'moose' not to refer to the entire species as such, but only to the North American branch, pretty much the way you might call the North American reindeer by its local name 'caribou'. It that true?

I had an interesting conversation with another non-native speaker the other day. She happened to be a retired English teacher and like school teachers sometimes do, she'd correct my English in a subtle but unmistakable way, especially when I used Americanisms, which admittedly I do. She obviously took pride in speaking genuine British English herself. It felt slightly awkward, but amusing at the same time, and on the whole she was nice and charming. At a certain point we talked about Scandinavia and I told her I'd been there and I'd had a close encounter with a moose during a trek in the forests. She reacted by pretending not to know the word and when I described the animal, she said, "Oh, you mean _elk_?" Hence my question.


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## joanvillafane

Hi Hans M.  Did you check out the scientific names of each animal?
There's a very clear definition here Moose - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and an explanation of why the British use "elk" for the same animal as "moose."   The animal has been extinct in Britain.

"the word "elk" is used in North America to refer to a different animal, _Cervus canadensis_, which is also called by theAlgonkian indigenous name, "wapiti"."


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## Copperknickers

joanvillafane said:


> Hi Hans M.  Did you check out the scientific names of each animal?
> There's a very clear definition here Moose - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> and an explanation of why the British use "elk" for the same animal as "moose."   The animal has been extinct in Britain.
> 
> "the word "elk" is used in North America to refer to a different animal, _Cervus canadensis_, which is also called by theAlgonkian indigenous name, "wapiti"."



Well, that doesn't quite answer the question though. We need to distinguish between two different types of animal here:

The Moose (Alces Alces) 
The Wapiti (Cervus Canadensis)

Neither of those exist in the UK, and most Brits will only be familiar with Alces Alces, from watching American TV shows where it is called 'moose'. As such this usage has now spread into British English.

'Elk' however was used as a generic term for large deer of any kind, Alces Alces or otherwise. It was what we called European Alces Alces before the discovery of the Americas, and it is what the settlers called the Wapiti also (there has never been any kind of Wapiti in Europe, although there are some Cervus Canadensis in China and Eastern Russia which obviously were not known to the British until relatively recently). It's also what we call the large Irish deer which went extinct a couple of thousand years ago: the 'giant Irish elk' which would have been familiar to Brits from the occasional skeleton that was dug up, although no English speaker ever saw a live one.

As to whether 'elk' is still used by Brits: generally speaking, no, except in reference to the Wapiti, which has monopolised the use of the word 'elk' in scientific literature. Maybe it was once used for European Alces Alces, but these days 80% of Brits would see an Alces Alces in Sweden or Norway, and call it 'moose' because they are familiar with the same animal in Canada and the US. But the general term 'elk' for a large deer of any kind is still occasionally used by Brits (wapiti, moose, red deer, etc).


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## Hermione Golightly

I know what a moose is and a few places where they live from watching wild life TV shows and because I hoped to see one when I was on a trip to North Dakota.
I'd say most people in the UK have a rough idea of 'moose'. I wouldn't know what an elk was except I'm interested in ancient history and occasionally 'elk' bones are found in excavations so I sort of know that ancient elks are something like modern moose. I have almost no idea about modern elk. Why would I?


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## Copperknickers

PS. I have spoken with several Swedish and Norwegian friends, who also speak fluent English, and they call their own Alces Alces 'moose'. As Hermione has confirmed, many British English speakers would have no idea that Alces Alces even existed in Europe any more, so we would likely just go by what our Scandinavian cousins called them if we hadn't already labelled them 'moose' from identifying them with Canadian moose.


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## sound shift

The other evening I unfortunately came across the "Hairy Bikers" on television. They were with the Sami people, north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, and they talked about the 'moose', not the 'elk'. (Not that I think they are experts in the matter.)

I know the word 'elk' from (1) Monty Python and (2) what the British motoring press dubbed "The Elk Test": a manoeuvre carried out by one of the Swedish motoring magazines as part of its road tests of new cars. The manoeuvre was supposed to replicate what the driver would have to do if an elk/moose ran out of the forest and onto the road in front of him. On one occasion, the car overturned, landing Stuttgart-based M.......-B..., once it had realised it wasn't all some sort of Swedish joke, with a major headache. Were it not that the Swedes call this animal "elg", I suspect that we in the UK would have used the term "The Moose Test".


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## PaulQ

I would call the creature an elk, and did so when I saw one in Sweden.

If the creature is in the USA, it is a moose: if it is in Sweden (most typically) it is an elk. In Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, elk is rendered as almost a homophone of elk.

I suspect the Swedes call the elk a moose as their English is heavily influenced by AE from TV shows and films.

The first English record of *elk *is "[_a_700   _Epinal Gloss._ 233   _Cer_[_v_]_us_, elch." (OED)

The first record of "*moose*" in English is 1614   S. Purchas _Pilgrimage_ (ed. 2) viii. v. 755   _Captaine Thomas Hanham sayled to the Riuer of Sagadahoc 1606. He relateth of their beasts..redde Deare, and a beast bigger, called the Mus._ (OED) and thereafter exclusively to the American species.

The OED also contains the note:"The usual name for the animal in North America (where _elk_ is used instead for the wapiti, _Cervus elaphus canadensis_)"


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## Copperknickers

PaulQ said:


> I would call the creature an elk, and did so when I saw one in Sweden.
> 
> If the creature is in the USA, it is a moose: if it is in Sweden (most typically) it is an elk. In Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, elk is rendered as almost a homophone of elk.



The Scandinavian languages' own word for Alces Alces is cognate with the English word 'elk'. English of course derives from the geographical area where Alces Alces was still an extant species, so our use of the word 'elk' for Alces Alces was a throwback to the time when the Saxons and Norse used to hunt them before they came over to the British isles. But I still think that the average English speaker today would call Alces Alces 'moose' even in Scandinavia, being totally unaware that the same species was once called 'elk'. 



> I suspect the Swedes call the elk a moose as their English is heavily influenced by AE from TV shows and films.



And more pertinently, Alces Alces do not exist in the UK, so they could scarcely have been influenced by British TV programmes if they tried, since references to Alces Alces are rather thin on the ground in the UK outside the context of North America. I don't know what David Attenborough calls European Alces Alces, he is old enough and familiar enough with these matters that he may still call them 'elk'. But I bet many younger British nature presenters have begun calling them moose by now.


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## PaulQ

Copperknickers said:


> But I bet many younger British nature presenters have begun calling them moose by now.


"O _tempora o mooses_"


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## JulianStuart

Copperknickers said:


> The Scandinavian languages' own word for Alces Alces is cognate with the English word 'elk'. English of course derives from the geographical area where Alces Alces was still an extant species, so our use of the word 'elk' for Alces Alces was a throwback to the time when the Saxons and Norse used to hunt them before they came over to the British isles. But I still think that the average English speaker today would call Alces Alces 'moose' even in Scandinavia, being totally unaware that the same species was once called 'elk'.
> 
> 
> 
> And more pertinently, Alces Alces do not exist in the UK, so they could scarcely have been influenced by British TV programmes if they tried, since references to Alces Alces are rather thin on the ground in the UK outside the context of North America. I don't know what David Attenborough calls European Alces Alces, he is old enough and familiar enough with these matters that he may still call them 'elk'. But I bet many younger British nature presenters have begun calling them moose by now.


We may be drifting away from the language question, but the animal roamed Britain from the end of the last ice age and is estimated to have died out/been extirpated by ~1500BC, so those who hunted them probably had a word long before the Saxons and Norse showed up.  Greek had alke and Spanish has alce, so the early population of Britain after the ice age, coming from W. Europe and N. Spain could have had the word already.  Of course, by the time the Norseand Angles and Saxons brought their parts of English to Britain, the locals had probably forgotten about something that had been gone for over two millennia


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## Cynthia M.

Funny but I was on _The Guardian_ yesterday and there was an article on the Swedish number (you can call this telephone number and talk to a random Swede about anything.) The commenters got to discussing what they would talk to a Swede about, and of course moose came up . The commenters were using the word "moose" but one commenter objected to it:

"They(Moose). are called Elk in Sweden and the rest of Europe and as Sweden has the most Elk in the world,it would be respectful to use their right name;-) "

All of the above would lead me to believe that "moose" is the term commonly used in Britain, correctly or not.


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## RedwoodGrove

"Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?


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## By-the-sea

I'm with PaulQ and also call it an_ elk_ but, as others have suggested, since there are none in the UK I think it really depends on the individual and their experiences. My use of the word elk almost certainly comes from my Dad, confirming Copperknickers' generational point. For me moose are firmly associated with the American continent.


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## JulianStuart

RedwoodGrove said:


> "Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?


That's clear enough for me


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## Cynthia M.

RedwoodGrove said:


> "Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?



Good catch. Two possibilities come to mind: the Brits have been influenced by current North American usage because we have moose and as far as I know they don't, or early New England colonists (who were still British of course) used the word and it was adopted by the British.


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## JulianStuart

Cynthia M. said:


> Good catch. Two possibilities come to mind: the Brits have been influenced by current North American usage because we have moose and as far as I know they don't, or early New England colonists (who were still British of course) used the word and it was adopted by the British.


It does seem that the directionality is established by the Algonquin source.  Presumably, the word elk was brought from Europe at that time (when fur trappers in NA were returning or communicatiing with UK) and proably before then, so why the choice?  I personally find moose more euphonious than elk


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## Wordsmyth

RedwoodGrove said:


> "Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?


Logically it wouldn't be; but, as others have said, Europe sees a lot of US films and TV productions.

At the end of the day, it probably depends on what we were taught (or what we read/heard) at some impressionable age. Like Paul and By-the-sea, I use "moose" in a North American context, but "elk" for the European equivalent — only because that's what I learnt at some point, and I haven't questioned it since. I'm talking about the kind with the big blunt nose, the lollopy skin under the throat and antlers you could serve dinner on (for the males anyway) — and not the kind (N.Am "elk/wapiti") that looks rather more like a reindeer.

_[Edit]:_


RedwoodGrove said:


> "Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?


Thinking about it, Red, I suppose one might ask "Why would it be used in English (even NAmE)?. In either case it's a borrowing from another language to which people are exposed.

Ws


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## JulianStuart

Wordsmyth said:


> Logically it wouldn't be; but, as others have said, Europe sees a lot of US films and TV productions.
> 
> At the end of the day, it probably depends on what we were taught (or what we read/heard) at some impressionable age. Like Paul and By-the-sea, I use "moose" in a North American context, but "elk" for the European equivalent — only because that's what I learnt at some point, and I haven't questioned it since. I'm talking about the kind with the big blunt nose, the lollopy skin under the throat and antlers you could serve dinner on (for the males anyway) — and not the kind (N.Am "elk/wapiti") that look rather more like a reindeer.
> 
> Ws


If I found myself in the appropriate situations, I'd probably do the same.  In the US I refer to the sidewalk while in the UK I refer to it as pavement (see my sig)


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## RedwoodGrove

Confusingly, Wikipedia has two articles, _Moose_ and _Elk_. Under _Moose _it has this:_ Alces alces_ is called a "moose" in North American English, but an "elk" in British English. That same word "elk" in North American English refers to a completely different species of deer, the _Cervus canadensis_, also called the wapiti .

Apparently both moose and elk are the largest extant species of the deer family, according to Wikipedia. Very helpful.


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## Cynthia M.

JulianStuart said:


> Presumably, the word elk was brought from Europe at that time (when fur trappers in NA were returning or communicatiing with UK) and proably before then, so why the choice?



I'm not sure the word "elk" was brought over from Europe if in fact they were already extinct by then. From Wikipedia (yeah, I know...):

Confusingly, the word "elk" is used in North America to refer to a different animal, _Cervus canadensis_, which is also called by theAlgonkian indigenous name, "wapiti". The British began colonizing America in the 17th century, and found two common species of deer for which they had no names. The wapiti appeared very similar to the red deer of Europe (which itself was almost extinct in Southern Britain) although it was a lot larger and was not red.[8] The moose was a rather strange looking deer to the colonists, and they often adopted local names for both. In the early days of American colonization, the wapiti was often called a grey moose and the moose was often called a black moose, but early accounts of the animals varied wildly, adding to the confusion.[10]

Another possibility is that the only exposure to moose the British have had is through Bullwinkle


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## JulianStuart

Cynthia M. said:


> I'm not sure the word "elk*" was brought over from Europe if in fact they were already extinct by then. From Wikipedia (yeah, I know...):q


They died out in the UK est~1500BC, but the UK had been in constant communication with the rest of Europe since the end of the ice age and the elk had not died out there - so hides, meat and stories would very likely have been coming into the UK regularly - at least well before the Algonquin word arrived as European settlers returned from NA or sent word of the same species.

* I meant the alk root from Europe ...


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## Cynthia M.

JulianStuart said:


> They died out in the UK est~1500BC, but the UK had been in constant communication with the rest of Europe since the end of the ice age and the elk had not died out there - so hides, meat and stories would very likely have been coming into the UK regularly - at least well before the Algonquin word arrived as European settlers returned from NA or sent word of the same species.
> 
> * I meant the alk root from Europe ...



Hmmm... interesting but speculative. If your "constant communication" hypothesis is right, why do they use orignal in Quebec rather than the "moose" of Anglophone Canadians and Americans, or for that matter, the elan of France? p.s might start a thread about this in French-English forum.


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## JulianStuart

Cynthia M. said:


> Hmmm... interesting but speculative. If your "constant communication" hypothesis is right, why do they use orignal in Quebec rather than the "moose" of Anglophone Canadians and Americans, or for that matter, the elan of France? p.s might start a thread about this in French-English forum.


(Without written records, the movement of this word is perforce speculative, but the communication is documented in archaeological findings)

Are we at cross-purposes here?  Are you saying elk is not used at all in the UK and PaulQ's use of elk is simply European PC?? Maybe the Quebecois didn't like the sound of "moose" because it sounded like dessert (The French forum might be the place to see if elan and elk are related etymologically)


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## Cynthia M.

JulianStuart said:


> Are you saying elk is not used at all in the UK



Of course not. I'm just wondering if in the 17th century the British colonists were so familiar with the word "elk" that they would have used this instead of adopting a Native name. If as you say they mostly used the term because of its end products, they wouldn't necessarily make the connection between the moose that they saw and the elk fur or meat they knew.



JulianStuart said:


> Maybe the Quebecois didn't like the sound of "moose" because it sounded like dessert


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## JulianStuart

Cynthia M. said:


> Of course not. I'm just wondering if in the 17th century the British colonists were so familiar with the word "elk" that they would have used this instead of adopting a Native name. If as you say they mostly used the term because of its end products, they wouldn't necessarily make the connection between the moose that they saw and the elk fur or meat they knew.


OK  The word may have been around in Britain but I expect few had seen a picture, so products and stories.  When they arrived in NA, there were these animals the locals called moose.  (These naming things are complex- the Robin in NA is not closely related to the European Robin but it was close enough for the settlers.)


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## Copperknickers

RedwoodGrove said:


> "Moose" is an Algonquin word. Why would it be used in European languages?



Because it describes what is, from the British perspective, a North American animal. Most Brits are not particularly au fait with the wildlife of mainland Europe. American culture is far more widely penetrating in the UK than German or Scandinavian culture, so it's not surprising that we are more familiar with American wildlife than with Scandinavian wildlife. For the same reason, many British people might use the term 'grizzly bear' more commonly than 'brown bear', despite the fact that 'grizzly bear' is a term which refers only to North American brown bears, whereas there are brown bears in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe too.



Cynthia M. said:


> I'm not sure the word "elk" was brought over from Europe if in fact they were already extinct by then. From Wikipedia (yeah, I know...)



Alces Alces is extinct in Britain and has been for thousands of years, but it remains common in other parts of Europe. We long ago lost any indigenous British word for it, because we speak English, a language which originally comes from Germany, and the last people in Britain to see a wild Alces Alces were pre-Celtic. Our word 'elk' comes from an Old English word which was indeed used to refer to the wild Alces Alces that were seen on a daily basis by the Anglo-Saxons: or rather, by the Angle and Saxon tribes of ancient Germany before they made the crossing to Britain.

So the word 'elk', although it originally referred to the European 'moose' (Alces alces) in the Anglo-Saxon period, came to refer in more recent English to any kind of large deer, as people became unfamiliar with the specific animal it represented. And so it was applied to North American 'moose' by settlers, who were probably completely ignorant that it had ever referred to the same type of animal back in Europe (as we can easily tell, by the fact they also used it to refer to the wapiti, which looks nothing like a moose). Some British traders and travellers may have gone to places in Europe through the centuries where Alces Alces still roamed, but if they called Alces Alces 'elk' it was only because that was what they called all large deer, and also because they must have recognised the similarity between the English word and the native Germanic names for the animal.

There are nevertheless references to it being called 'German elk', which presumably differentiates it from large red deer. Later on, when scientists started categorising animals according to more strictly defined criteria, the word 'elk' came to be specifically applied to Alces Alces again. But unless anyone can find evidence to the contrary, I maintain that 'elk' was never a specific name for European Alces Alces in any form of the English language until the last 2-300 years or so, and now once again it has lost popularity as such among lay people.


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## Cynthia M.

Copperknickers said:


> So the word 'elk', although it originally referred to the European 'moose' (Alces alces) in the Anglo-Saxon period, came to refer in more recent English to any kind of large deer, as people became unfamiliar with the specific animal it represented. And so it was applied to North American 'moose' by settlers,



What's your source for all this? How do you know the word "elk" was ever used for North American moose by settlers and colonists?

At any rate, here's an NGram for British English use of "moose" from 1600 to 2000.

Google Ngram Viewer


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## london calling

I personally have always associated moose with North America. I would call the European variety an elk.


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## Copperknickers

Cynthia M. said:


> What's your source for all this? How do you know the word "elk" was ever used for North American moose by settlers and colonists?



Well if the word 'moose' is a native American borrowing, and the original British word for the same thing is 'elk', then that doesn't leave many other options for what the British settlers called the moose before they adopted the native name.


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## Wordsmyth

Cynthia M. said:


> How do you know the word "elk" was ever used for North American moose by settlers and colonists?
> 
> At any rate, here's an NGram for British English use of "moose" from 1600 to 2000. Google Ngram Viewer


That ngram shows no evidence of the word "moose" before 1695. The colonies in New England and Virginia date from 1607. Assuming that some of the colonists encountered _Alces alces _during those 88 years, they must have called it something: if it wasn't "moose", I'd say "elk" would be the obvious candidate.

Buffon's Natural History (1792) uses the word "elk" to describe an animal of which pictures and a set of antlers were displayed by the Hudson's Bay Company: "The elk has horns with _f_hort beams _f_preading into large and broad palms ... the outmo_f_t furni_f_hed with _f_everal _f_harp _f_nags." "The upper lip was _f_quare, hung greatly over the lower ... The no_f_e was very broad. Under the throat was a _f_mall excre_f_cence, from whence hung a long tuft of coar_f_e black hair."

The reference to "broad palms", and the description of the nose and and lips and the excrescence under the throat, all point to this "elk" being a moose, and not what Americans call an elk.

Ws


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## Delvo

JulianStuart said:


> These naming things are complex- the Robin in NA is not closely related to the European Robin but it was close enough for the settlers.


It's a common phenomenon with New World plants & animals. We have an animal closely related to the Old World bison, but nothing like Old World buffalo, so our "bison" gets called both "bison" and "buffalo". The New World's two largest felines (one solid-colored, one spotted) don't exist in the Old World, but we don't have lions or leopards here, so the solid-colored North American one got called "mountain lion" and the spotted South American one got called by an old alternate name for leopard, "panther". (They are also now often known by names from Native languages: "cougar" and "puma" for the mountain lion, "jaguar" for the South American "panther". "Panther" has, since "jaguar" became more common for the species name, also shifted to usually refer only to uncommon all-black jaguars & leopards.) (The word "panther" also somehow jumped from spotted felines to one subspecies of cougar/puma, the Florida panther, for no discernable reason.) Old World antelopes have no close relatives here, but their name got applied to a North American animal with a generally similar appearance, the "pronghorn antelope" (which is more closely related to giraffes and okapis). "Corn" was once generally a synonym for "grain" and still might be to outsiders, but here it's the name of a species that outsiders would probably know as "maize": the only New World grain plant used by humans. The name "cedar" was originally used for Old World trees of the genus _Cedrus_, but has been applied to members of at least eight different genera in North America, none of which are _Cedrus_, but somehow including some _Juniprus_ species even though junipers were already known in the Old World. In the Old World, "sycamore" is a species of maple, but here, it got applied to a very distinctive tree that couldn't ever be mistaken for a maple (I guess because its leaves are shaped like gigantic maple leaves) and would have been called a "planetree" in the Old World. We also have large trees called "hemlocks" just because they apparently smell similar to the original hemlock herb of the Old World, and "Douglas-firs" that are unrelated to firs (even though we do have actual fir trees too), and so on.



Copperknickers said:


> So the word 'elk', although it originally referred to the European 'moose' (Alces alces) in the Anglo-Saxon period, came to refer in more recent English to any kind of large deer, as people became unfamiliar with the specific animal it represented. And so it was applied to North American 'moose' by settlers, who were probably completely ignorant that it had ever referred to the same type of animal back in Europe (as we can easily tell, by the fact they also used it to refer to the wapiti, which looks nothing like a moose).


No, "elk" over here never means _Alces_. It only means _Cervus_. It got that way because _Cervus_ were the first oversized deer they saw and they knew that "elk" vaguely meant some kind of oversized deer-like animal they weren't familiar with. If they had called _Alces_ "elk", then they wouldn't have needed to find a new name for it later, _Alces_ would be known by only one name among all English-speakers, and there wouldn't be anything unusual about it to talk about, just as we aren't discussing anything out of the ordinary about Old World and New World names for wolves.



Copperknickers said:


> I maintain that 'elk' was never a specific name for European Alces Alces in any form of the English language until the last 2-300 years or so, and now once again it has lost popularity as such among lay people.


I see no way to make any sense out of that. The fact that settlers here used it before then means the word existed in the language, and it's also quite well known that it was never applied to _Cervus_ in the Old World (where they were called "red deer"), so what else do you think it meant back then instead of _Alces_?


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## Cynthia M.

Wordsmyth said:


> That ngram shows no evidence of the word "moose" before 1695. The colonies in New England and Virginia date from 1607. Assuming that some of the colonists encountered _Alces alces _during those 88 years, they must have called it something: if it wasn't "moose", I'd say "elk" would be the obvious candidate.



Ngrams are interesting and fun but an imperfect proxy for real-world usage. Don't think there are/were many moose in Virginia. Significant white population expansion in New England began after about 1620. Ngrams chronicle the use of words found in books scanned by Google Books, and I think that New Englanders in the early decades of settlement had other things to do besides write books about wildlife, or any books at all, for that matter.


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## Delvo

Copperknickers said:


> Well if the word 'moose' is a native American borrowing, and the original British word for the same thing is 'elk', then that doesn't leave many other options for what the British settlers called the moose before they adopted the native name.


Why suppose that they called it something other than "moose" first and then switched to "moose"? That goes against not only the fact that they had already used "elk" for the North American _Cervus_, but also the fact that they would have heard of North American _Alces_ by its Native names before ever seeing one. The original British landing & colonization sites were in _Cervus_ territory but not in _Alces_ territory.


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## Wordsmyth

Delvo said:


> The original British landing & colonization sites were in _Cervus_ territory but not in _Alces_ territory.


 From this wikipedia article: "The historical range _[of the moose]_ ... extended from well into Quebec, the Maritimes, and Eastern Ontario south to include *all of New England* ..." The first New England colony in 1607 (Popham, in present-day Maine) lasted about a year. Then, as Cynthia says, from 1620 onwards numerous New England colonies sprang up. Sounds to me as though they might well have bumped into a few _Alces_ before they got around to having coherent enough conversations with the locals to learn the Algonquin word.



Delvo said:


> It got that way because _Cervus_ were the first oversized deer they saw and they knew that "elk" vaguely meant some kind of oversized deer-like animal they weren't familiar with. If they had called _Alces_ "elk", then they wouldn't have needed to find a new name for it later,


 I don't really follow the logic of that. Firstly it assumes that all settlers everywhere reacted the same way, using the same word for an animal they didn't know the name of (which seems unlikely). Secondly, if for want of an accurate name for _Alces_ they adopted the Algonquin name, then why wouldn't they have done the same with _Cervus_ (which they'd never seen before) and called it a _wapiti_?

Here's an alternative scenario. Some settlers seeing _Cervus_ for the first time called it an elk (for the reason you've suggested). Some others, or maybe even some of the same ones, seeing _Alces_ for the first time called it an elk (for the same reason). After a while, confusion arose, so they _did_ need to find a new name for one or the other.

This is all guesswork, of course, as none of us can know what really happened unless we can come up with a lot more evidence. But I did cite one instance (in #30) of "elk" being used, in the 18th century, to describe a moose in a North American context, and I'm guessing it's not an isolated exception.



Cynthia M. said:


> Ngrams are interesting and fun but an imperfect proxy for real-world usage. _[...]_
> Ngrams chronicle the use of words found in books scanned by Google Books, and I think that New Englanders in the early decades of settlement had other things to do besides write books about wildlife, or any books at all, for that matter.


Yes indeed. So your ngram doesn't actually tell us anything about the usage in the first century of colonisation. They may have said "moose" or they may have said "elk", or both.

But thinking about it a bit more (and looking into some of the publications behind the ngram results), maybe it _does_ tell us something. While the colonists themselves may not have written wildlife books, they did send reports back to various authorities (the crown, the government, the trading houses, ...) about progress in the colonies, including hunting opportunities and trading activities (moose-skins, for instance).

Some of the content of these reports found their way into publications written in Britain, so they _are_ represented to some degree in books. And yet "moose" doesn't appear in publications covered by Google Books until a century after the first colonists arrived. I see two possible conclusions: either Google Books haven't scanned any relevant documents from that period, or the colonists weren't using the word "moose" in the early days.

There are, however, a number of publications in later years that refer to the moose or moose-deer as the "elk or moose", or that specify that the American moose is known in Britain as an elk.



Cynthia M. said:


> Don't think there are/were many moose in Virginia.


 In the early days of colonisation, "Virginia" referred to virtually the whole Eastern seaboard. But OK, in what is present-day Virginia, no moose.

Ws
_[Edit: Typo]_​


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## Cynthia M.

Wordsmyth, your observations are interesting but again, speculative.

I found an account by an Englishman, William Wood, called _New England's Prospect _(1634) where he mentions "the large-limbed mooses [_sic_]." He later says that the beast called moose "is not unlike red deare" but does not bring up the word "elk."


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## PaulQ

My post #7 above gives the first record of "Mus" in 1614 by a Captain Thomas Hanham. He had never seen such a beast before and he accepted the native name for the creature. I assume that it is from this, and other curious explorers, that it became a moose in the American colonies. 

Two quotes from the OED's entry on "elk" are interesting:
1541   _Act 33 Hen. VIII_ c. 6   It shall be lawfull..to have, exercise, and vse their handgounnes..so that it be at no maner of deere..or wild elke.
[1555   R. Eden tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria _Decades of Newe Worlde_ f. 275,   Bisontes, which in theyr toonge [Swedish] they caule Elg, (that is) wilde asses.]

It seems clear that as, in 1541, there were no elk in England, elk was used for some sort of deer.
The 1555 quote gives an idea that those who had been to America were a bit vague on the natural history, mistaking a bison for a wild ass and calling them elks .

It seems reasonable that in the American colonies these unusual creatures were know as moose, whereas the Swedes called them elk, and as there were few (apart from the Swedes) who had seen both, the names grew separately and have remained, to a large degree, such.


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## Wordsmyth

Cynthia M. said:


> Wordsmyth, your observations are interesting but again, speculative.


That's true, Cynthia. But then this whole thread is speculative, at least with regard to whether British settlers ever used the existing word "elk" for _Alces_, before adopting the Algonquin name in the form of "moose".

Well done for finding the 1634 example. That's earlier than anything I could find. I hadn't thought about different spellings, be it for the plural or the singular. So now we have one example with "moose" and not "elk", one with "elk" and not "moose" (referring to _Alces_, not _Cervus_), and I found quite a few that cite both terms for the same beast (often specifying American usage vs British usage).

Ws


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## Delvo

What else do you propose they called the animal, or what else do you propose the word meant?

_Cervus_ already had its own names in all northern Eurasian languages, and those names, like "red deer", already had their animal. "Elk" and its cognates in various Indo-European languages that hadn't migrated out of _Alces_ territory always indicated _Alces_ since prehistoric times. Among others, _De Bello Gallico_ shows that Julius Caesar got the name from Germanic-speaking people before such a language even arrived in England. Even with _Alces_ gone from the islands, they were still known in England from history and contemporary interaction with the continent, and needed a name when Englishers talked about them. Their linguistic ancestors had had that word for it all along and no reason to replace it, nor any evidence that they did so. And even if English-speakers had at some time dropped English's inherited word for _Alces_, which was definitely (some version of) "elk" (alc, elg) because that's what everybody else in the northwestern IE families always called it, and thought of it as a foreign animal and accordingly used an imported foreign word for it, that word would still have been (some version of) "elk" (alc, elg) anyway. The language had no other name to call it, and no other animal to apply that name to.

Suggesting that a word disappeared and then reappeared with the same meaning between two known times when its use is observable/reconstructible, during which time the thing it refers to is not found being called by any other name instead, is rather beyond merely "speculative"; presuming that it was there continuously from its latest phonetic reconstruction to its earliest written attestation is not speculative at all.


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## Wordsmyth

I'm not sure who you're addressing in your last post, Delvo. It followed directly after mine, but I can't see any connection with anything I've said, so I assume it's not for me.

But out of curiosity ...


Delvo said:


> What else do you propose they called the animal, or what else do you propose the word meant?


Who is "they"? Who is "you"? What is "the word"?

Ws


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## PaulQ

Google Ngrams for the search term (BE as compared with AE) elk: *eng_gb_2012,moose: eng_gb_2012,elk: eng_us_2012,moose: eng_us_2012* gives a rather surprising result.

It seems that, in written AE, "elk" is commoner but that many references to "elk" are to formal writing and there may be a little skewing caused by Native Americans with "Elk" in their name.


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## Myridon

PaulQ said:


> Google Ngrams for the search term (BE as compared with AE) elk: *eng_gb_2012,moose: eng_gb_2012,elk: eng_us_2012,moose: eng_us_2012* gives a rather surprising result.
> 
> It seems that, in written AE, "elk" is commoner but that many references to "elk" are to formal writing and there may be a little skewing caused by Native Americans with "Elk" in their name.


What do you find surprising?
AmE "elk" is a much more common animal with a much wider range than the AmE "moose".  
I have never seen a wild moose.  I have seen many wild elk.


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## Roxxxannne

PaulQ said:


> _Captaine Thomas Hanham sayled to the Riuer of Sagadahoc 1606. He relateth of their beasts..redde Deare, and a beast bigger, called the Mus._


So many redde Deare there now, and still, occasionally, a Mus.


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## PaulQ

Myridon said:


> What do you find surprising?


I expected a countryside of rolling hills, rivers, and forests filled with meece mooses moose: you're offering wapiti which be a redde Deare. I had heard of wapiti, but not "American elk."


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## sdgraham

PaulQ said:


> I had heard of wapiti, but not "American elk."


We don't call them "American elk." We just call them "elk" or "North American elk."They're in Canada as well, not to mention the taxonomic name of _Cervus *canadensis*_
There's even a lodge, "the "Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks." 



Most Americans, particularly in the West, probably have heard of the Indian "wapiti," but it apparently has been seized upon by Europeans, trying to keep things straight.

"Wapiti" does not even appear in the 2019 Oregon Big Game Hunting regulations, which just say "elk."

As a side note, our guide this past June in Norway and Sweden took pains to point out to us that if we saw a reference to "elk" that it referred to moose, which are all over the place up there. (genus _Alces)_.


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## S1m0n

I think 'wapiti' is a term from the Cree language group. Natives here on Vancouver Island call them 'elk'.


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## kentix

I think most Americans also know moose about as much from Bullwinkle as anything else. The natural range of moose doesn't cover much of the United States, and doesn't include any very large population centers. I've only ever seen moose on TV (and I don't think I've seen elk either).


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## sdgraham

kentix said:


> The natural range of moose doesn't cover much of the United States, and doesn't include any very large population centers.


Quite true. Moose don't deal well with traffic jams, etc. They are, however, becoming a problem along our border with Canada, and even down into Colorado in the mountains behind Boulder. (My brother-in-law has a regular visitor).
They're a regular feature in Yellowstone National Park in northwestern Wyoming, but that's the smaller Shiras moose. The really big guys prowl around Anchorage, Alaska.
I took one one fall in Montana and it fed my family of five all winter.


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## S1m0n

They're a big problem on roads in Canada, because unlike deer they are tall enough that if a car hits one, 800 or more pounds of bodyweight is going to land on the windshield or roof. I've known people killed this way.


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## Vansnitchzel

Hello from Finland.

Thought to reply an old thread because this interests me, and the way I've thought this to be obvious apparently isn't.

The way I've learnt these words and use is that Moose would refer to_ Alces Alces_, which is native and very common around here. Elk would be _Cervus_ species, of which _Cervus Ephalus_ is mandatory to know for hunting license here, though it's not native species.

_Alces Alces_ and _Cervus_ don't really look at all similar, so it seems logical way to speak about them. Of course in finnish we have our own very old word for these spcies, that also mixes them somewhat: Hirvi for _Alces Alces_ and Saksanhirvi (literally german elk/moose) for _Cervus Ephalus._


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## Edinburgher

Where is @MrMuselk when you need him? He should know a thing or two about elks and meese.


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## PaulQ




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