What’s In a Name?

by Beverley Haagensen

One of the first things that comes to my mind when I hear “rabbit” is to wonder why there are so many English words for this hopping fur ball?

middle ages compared to hares. This surprised me because the reverse is true today. I can count hare sightings from our small Gloucestershire farm over the past 15 years on one hand, while rabbits are a daily sight if you get up early enough.

There is bunny, rabbit, coney and even hare for its long legged cousin. Where do all these names come from? So I did a little research for this Year of the Rabbit.

I expected to find an Anglo-Saxon heritage and was greatly surprised to find that research suggests there were no rabbits in England when the northern raiders arrived and that they were almost certainly introduced by the Normans in the 11th century. There is not even an Anglo Saxon word for rabbit.

Hare, on the other hand, is clearly of Germanic origin and came to us through Old English or Anglo Saxon.

Following their introduction to the British Isles, it seems rabbits were not common throughout the

However, in medieval times they were not called rabbits. Rabbit entered the English language in the 14th century and only referred to babies. The word is believed to have come from Northern French or Flemish. The adult animal was a “coney” which has clear links to Norman French.

Rabbit began to be used for the adult animal in the 18th century which is why in the King James Bible of 1611, Leviticus refers to the coney and the hare.

Baby rabbits today are called kittens. My older sisters kept rabbits when we were young and I’ll never forget seeing their blind, naked “kittens” squirming in the burrow. In my research I was interested to discover that hares give birth to fully furred and sighted young called leverets.

So what of bunny? The most favoured theory is that it comes from the Scottish Gaelic “bun” meaning bottom, stump or stub. This makes sense to me as my abiding memory of seeing rabbits in the countryside is their flashing white, stumpy tail as they hop away.

Beverley Haagensen lives in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK, where she is currently home educating the youngest of her six children. She also runs a small farm with horticulture, poultry and sheep and spins and plant dyes her sheep's wool.