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cebra

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Etymology and origin of the Spanish word cebra

Confidence
Probable
Formation
Inherited
First attested
1204 a document on the resettlement of the Tagus lands, as ezebras More words from the 13th century
Inherited from
Old Spanish ezebra
Ultimate origin
Latin equiferus

Pronunciation

  • /ˈθebɾa/, [ˈθe.β̞ɾa], /ˈsebɾa/[1]

Forms

cebra f (plural cebras)[1] Medieval Castilian and Portuguese have zebro, zebra, enzebro, enzebra, ezebra and azebra.[2] The DEMel counts ezebra as the commonest Old Spanish form, beside zebra, çebra, encebras and acebras.[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish ezebra (“onager, wild ass”), whose origin is uncertain.[4][1][2] Corominas, following Joaquín de Silveira, derives it from Vulgar Latin *eciferus, the popular form of Latin equiferus (“wild horse”), built on ecus, the common pronunciation of classical equus (“horse”).[2][5] He accepts this etymology because it solves every phonetic difficulty, and notes that Menéndez Pidal, Giese and Baldinger accepted it too.[2] The DLE gives the Latin word only as a possibility, and Wiktionary allows that it may have come through another Romance language first.[4][1]

Menéndez Pidal had first proposed zephyrus (“west wind”), after the classical legend that swift mares conceived by the west wind, and had to explain the missing diphthong by a Portuguese origin.[2][6] Corominas set this aside once Silveira showed that the wild ass was much commoner in Castile than in Portugal.[2] He also rejects a derivation from separare and Spitzer's comparison with the name of a sacrificial animal in Old High German and Lombard, since the name of a strictly Hispanic animal could not have undergone the High German consonant shift.[2]

The word was shared with western Ibero-Romance: Old Galician-Portuguese zevra appears in 1166, and Old Galician has ezebro.[2] Portuguese zebra is the modern Portuguese form.[7][1] Old Catalan atzebra and Old French azoivre are rare and, for Corominas, adaptations of the Hispanic word, since there were no onagers in France.[2]

The Latin compound joins the word for “horse” and ferus (“wild”), and Pliny uses it for a kind of wild horse.[8][1][9]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas's first record is zebra in a Toledo Cathedral document of 1207, and the DEMel has the plural ezebras already in 1204.[2][3] In these medieval texts the word names the onager or wild ass, then common in Spain, an animal thought of as shy and very fast.[2][5] The Fuero de Sepúlveda (c. 1300) taxes cuero de buey o de ezebra “ox hide or wild-ass hide”.[10]

Semantic evolution

Place names such as Encebros, Encebrico and Cebreros show how widespread the wild ass was, from Portugal and Galicia to León, Burgos, Ávila and Albacete.[2] Medieval writers used it as the type of the swift, unruly animal: a ballad of about 1500 has King Marsín fleeing cavallero en una zebra “mounted on a wild ass”, and Enrique de Villena says its meat was eaten to drive away sloth.[2] Alfonso X's Lapidario mentions the figure of the head of an ezebra.[11]

The name passed to the striped African animal through the Portuguese, who discovered the Cape of Good Hope.[2] Covarrubias in 1611 already describes it as an African beast like a horse, extremely fast, and guesses that the name is Arabic or a metathesis of cierva “hind”.[12] He records the saying that a very wild and unruly woman es como una cebra “is like a zebra”.[12] Autoridades repeats both guesses.[13] The Academy called it voz etiópica in 1899, and still printed “disputed etymology” in 2001.[14][15] The Spanish word is the source of the English, Italian and Portuguese zebra and of French zèbre.[16]

In Argentina, Cuba, Colombia and Uruguay cebra alone also names a zebra crossing.[4][17]

Timeline

  • 1091 – a Leonese document mentions a lagoon called Ezebrera, a place name.[2]
  • 1166 – Portuguese zevra is recorded.[2]
  • 1204 – ezebras in a document on the resettlement of the Tagus lands.[3]
  • 1207 – zebra in a document of the Toledo Cathedral archive, Corominas's first record.[2][5]
  • 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's Lapidario uses ezebra.[11]
  • c. 1495 – Nebrija glosses zebra as a known animal, Latin mula syria.[18]
  • 1611 – Covarrubias describes the African animal; the BDELC dates the modern sense from this year.[12][5]
  • 1899 – the Academy's dictionary calls the word Ethiopian and places the animal in southern Africa.[14]

Meanings

Noun

  1. zebra: an African equid like a donkey, with a whitish coat crossed by dark brown or black stripes: Vimos una manada de cebras junto al río.[4][19][1]
  2. (Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, Colombia) A zebra crossing, short for paso de cebra.[4][17]
  3. (obsolete) The onager or wild ass.[4]

Word family

  • cebrado
  • cebruno
  • Latin equiferus
  • Portuguese zebra

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g 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 Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cebra
  3. ^ a b c Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. cebra
  4. ^ a b c d e f 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. cebra
  5. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cebra
  6. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. s.v. equiferus
  7. ^ Houaiss, Antônio; Villar, Mauro de Salles (2001), Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, p. s.v. zebra
  8. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  9. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  10. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE
  11. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. cebra
  12. ^ a b c Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 570
  13. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 2
  14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1899), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 13th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y Compañía, p. 213
  15. ^ Real Academia Española (2001), Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, p. s.v. cebra
  16. ^ Gómez de Silva, Guido (1988), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México
  17. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer
  18. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv
  19. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. cebra
Cite this entry

“Cebra.” Etymologically, 7 Nov. 2026, etymologically.com/es/cebra. Accessed 7 Nov. 2026.

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