cayo

Forms

cayo m (plural cayos)^[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Taíno cayo (“small island”), from the Arawakan speech of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas.^[1][2][3][4] Corominas notes that the exact native form is unknown: it may have been cay, the spelling in Alonso de Santa Cruz's book of islands of 1541, or caic, to judge by Cuban caico “shoal, reef” and a plural caques that Friederici cites.^[3][5] Las Casas explained the name of the Lucayos, the people of the small islands, as “dwellers of the cays”, because in that language the word meant “islands”.^[3][6]

Wartburg derived the word from French quai (“quay”), from Gaulish caio (“wall”), which did reach the Cantabrian coast as Basque kaia (“harbour”) and Asturian cai (“quay”);^[7] Corominas rejects this for the Antillean word on historical and semantic grounds.^[3][7] Gómez de Silva nevertheless prefers an Old French source.^[8] Corominas also calls the Academy's old etymology, from a Low German word for “sandbank”, unfounded.^[3][9]

Spanish passed the word on to French caye, first recorded in 1678, and to English, where English cay is recorded from 1707 and key owes its spelling to confusion with the word for a lock.^[3][10][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Boyd-Bowman's earliest record is a Mexican document of 1547, about a man who spent two years en la conquista de los cayos “in the conquest of the cays” of Cuba.^[11] Corominas dates the word to 1551, in Escalante Fontaneda, and notes that Santa Cruz's Cay of 1541 may be a proper name.^[3][5]

Semantic evolution

The word has always named the low sandy or coral islets of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico;^[11] Corominas notes its use from northern Brazil to Florida.^[3][2] A document of 1625 glosses it as islote, and one of 1693 describes a cay formed of oyster shell.^[11] The Academy's dictionaries of 1817 and 1869 define it more broadly as the rocks or islets in the sea, mostly in the plural.^[12][13] In the Canary Islands cayo was used for a sandbank.^[14] In Cuba cayo de monte is a clump of trees standing alone in the savanna, and in Puerto Rico the word has also been used for a rock by a river or a mountain peak.^[15][16]

Timeline

• 1541 – Santa Cruz's Islario writes Cay, perhaps as a proper name.^[3]
• 1547 – a Mexican document speaks of la conquista de los cayos.^[11]
• 1551 – Escalante Fontaneda, Corominas's first record.^[3][5]
• 1678 – French caye, Corominas's date.^[3]
• 1707 – English cay, from the Spanish word.^[10]
• 1817 – the Academy's dictionary defines the word as the rocks or islets in the sea.^[12]
• 1917 – Alemany's dictionary derives it from Low German.^[9]

Meanings

Noun

1. A cay or key: a low, sandy island, often flooded and covered with mangrove, common in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.^[2][1]
2. (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico) A group of islets in the Caribbean.^[17]

Related words

• caico
• English cay

Usage notes

In Old Spanish texts cayo is also the unaccented spelling of the preterite cayó “fell” of caer; most of the CDH's early hits are this verb form.^[18] A 15th-century cayo “jay”, a variant of gayo, appears in Alfonso de la Torre's Visión deleitable.^[19]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. cayo
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 931
4. ^ a b Friederici, Georg (1947), Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch, Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter, p. 154
5. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cayo
6. ^ Grupo IATEXT, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, AMERLEX: corpus of americanisms in early texts on the Americas (online database), p. s.v. cayo
7. ^ a b García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. art. 1249
8. ^ Gómez de Silva, Guido (1988), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México, p. s.v. cayo
9. ^ a b Alemany y Bolufer, José (1917), Diccionario de la lengua española, Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, p. 358
10. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
11. ^ a b c d Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. cayo
12. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 190
13. ^ Real Academia Española (1869), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 11th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de Don Manuel Rivadeneyra, p. 164
14. ^ Real Academia Española (2021–), Tesoro de los diccionarios históricos de la lengua española (TDHLE): Diccionario histórico (1933–1936), its unpublished slips, Diccionario histórico (1960–1996), DHECan, DHECR, DHEVen, https://www.rae.es/tdhle, p. s.v. cayo
15. ^ Malaret, Augusto (1946), Diccionario de americanismos, 3rd ed., Buenos Aires: Emecé, p. 230
16. ^ Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española; Universidad de Puerto Rico, Tesoro lexicográfico del español de Puerto Rico, https://tesoro.pr, p. s.v. cayo
17. ^ Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. cayo
18. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. cayo
19. ^ Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, p. 658