centaur

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin centaurus, a borrowing first made in the Old English period,^[2] reinforced or reborrowed in Middle English as centaur,^[3] from Anglo-Norman centaure and Middle French centaure.^[2][4] The Latin word is from Ancient Greek κένταυρος (kéntauros),^[5][4][6][7] the name of a people of Thessaly and then of the half-human creature;^[2] its origin is unknown^[2][6][8] or, in Etymonline's word, disputed.^[5] Skeat noted that some had compared it with the name of a demigod in Sanskrit.^[9] Compare Catalan centaure (14th century), Spanish centauro (13th century), Portuguese centauro and Italian centauro (before 1321).^[2] French has the word from the last quarter of the 12th century.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

A mythological creature half man and half horse: the OED's first record is in the early Old English Cleopatra Glossary,^[2] and the Old English translation of Orosius already explains the Latin plural Centauri as "half horses, half men".^[2] Barnhart's first date for the Middle English word is about 1375, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,^[4] and Etymonline gives the late 14th century.^[5]

Semantic evolution

In early Greek literature the name belongs to a people of Thessaly, expert horsemen, and only later to creatures half man and half horse.^[2][4][5] The OED reports the suggestion that the hybrid arose from a first meeting with riders by a culture that did not know them; the Lapiths of Thessaly, kinsmen and foes of the centaurs, were called the inventors of horseback riding, and the Thessalian tribes claimed that their horse breeds came down from the centaurs.^[2] Two later quotations, one written before 1387, show a folk-etymological link with Latin centum (“hundred”).^[2] The name of the constellation Centaurus was already used by the Romans, and it has often been confused with Sagittarius since classical times.^[5] From the 16th century the word was applied figuratively, first to a fierce or bestial creature and then to anything made of two ill-matched elements,^[2] as in Byron's "That moral centaur, man and wife".^[10] Johnson (1755) calls it a poetical being, compounded of a man and a horse.^[11] The modern astronomical sense follows the convention of naming such objects after the centaurs of myth, because the first one observed had been named after Chiron.^[7]

Timeline

• early Old English – the mythological creature, half man and half horse.^[2]
• before 1387 – a member of a people of ancient Thessaly renowned for their horses, in Trevisa's translation of Higden.^[2]
• 1449 – the constellation Centaurus, in Metham's Amoryus and Cleopes.^[2] Etymonline dates the English name of the constellation to the 1550s.^[5]
• 1565 – a fierce, savage or bestial creature (obsolete by 1866).^[2]
• 1606 – a hybrid of incongruous elements, in Dekker.^[2]
• 1849 – an expert horse rider (obsolete by 1918).^[2]
• 1992 – a minor planet orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. In Greek mythology, a creature with the head, arms and torso of a man and the body and legs of a horse.^[8][2][12]
2. A member of a people of ancient Thessaly famed as riders, or of the half-bestial race that myth placed in its mountains.^[3][2][4]
3. (astronomy) Any of a class of asteroids or minor planets whose orbits lie mainly between those of Jupiter and Neptune.^[3][7][2]
4. Centaur: the constellation Centaurus.^[2][10]
5. Something made by combining two incongruous elements; a hybrid or chimera.^[2]

Word family

• centaurial
• centaurian
• centauric
• centauress

Related words

• centaury
• hippocentaur
• onocentaur

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. ^ a b c d e Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ a b c The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
9. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
12. ^ Soanes, Catherine; Stevenson, Angus, eds. (2004), Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press