θύννος

Forms

θῠ́ννος (thúnnos) m (genitive θῠ́ννου); second declension^[1] Feminine θύννα (thúnna) and θυννίς (thunnís).^[2][3]

Etymology

Beekes, Chantraine and Frisk treat it as a Mediterranean word, and Beekes classes it as Pre-Greek: the feminine θύννα (thúnna) with a short -α points to a Pre-Greek origin.^[4][5][3][6] Lewy compared Biblical Hebrew תַּנִּין (tannīn, “sea monster”) and Ugaritic tnn (“dragon”), but Chantraine rejects this, and Rosół counts it among the rejected Semitic etymologies.^[4][3][7][8] Wiktionary instead derives it from a Phoenician form of that word, which it finds in a place name meaning “island of tunnies” near Monastir.^[1]

The Greeks themselves connected it with θύνω (thúnō, “to dart”), as in Oppian's line on the tunnies that dart along, but LSJ, Chantraine and Frisk count this as a folk etymology.^[9][3][6]

Earliest recorded meaning

Its earliest records, meaning the tunny or tuna, are in Semonides and Hipponax and in a fragment ascribed to Hesiod; an oracle in Herodotus and Aeschylus's Persians follow.^[2][8][10]

Semantic evolution

The tunny was caught in large numbers in the Mediterranean, and Greek had words for its fishery: θυννοσκόπος (thunnoskópos) was the lookout who watched for the shoals, and θυννάζω (thunnázō) meant to fish for tunny.^[3][6][11] Aeschylus and Aristotle mention it, and Athenaeus discusses it at length.^[9]

Latin borrowed it as thynnus or Latin thunnus, the source of the Romance names.^[4][6][12] From Latin came English tunny (1520s, probably through French), and through Arabic and Spanish also American tuna (1881).^[11] Modern Greek calls the fish τόνος (tónos), a back-borrowing from Italian tonno.^[13]

Timeline

• 7th–6th century BC – Semonides and Hipponax name the tunny.^[2][8]
• 6th–5th century BC – Aeschylus uses it in the Persians.^[9][2]
• 5th century BC – Herodotus quotes an oracle that names it.^[9][4]
• 4th century BC – Aristotle mentions it in the History of Animals.^[9]
• 2nd century AD – Oppian links the name with the verb for darting.^[9]
• 1520s – English borrows tunny from Latin, probably through French.^[11]

Meanings

Noun

1. The tunny, tuna.^[9][2]

Word family

• θυννίς (thunnís)
• θυννοσκόπος (thunnoskópos)

Related words

• Latin thunnus
• English tunny
• English tuna

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
3. ^ a b c d e Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
4. ^ a b c d Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
5. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2014), Pre-Greek: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon, ed. Stefan Norbruis, Leiden; Boston: Brill
6. ^ a b c d Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
7. ^ Rosół, Rafał (2013), Frühe semitische Lehnwörter im Griechischen, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang
8. ^ a b c Scarborough, Matthew (2025), PHILOGLOSSA: database of Pre-Greek and other non-Indo-European words in Ancient Greek, version 1.0
9. ^ a b c d e f g Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
11. ^ a b c Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
12. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
13. ^ Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών (Ίδρυμα Μανόλη Τριανταφυλλίδη) (1998), Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής, Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki