Guans

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Large forest-dwelling birds of Central and South America that resemble turkeys and belong to the family that includes curassows and chachalacas
2. Tropical American fowl with long necks and dark plumage, found in forests from Mexico southward and hunted for food
3. Arboreal game birds of the Americas, related to curassows, that feed on fruit high in the forest canopy

Etymology: "Guans" is the plural of "guan," a name for a South and Central American game bird of the curassow family, related to the turkey. The word traveled into English from American Spanish, which had taken it from Kuna, the language of the Indigenous Kuna people of Panama and the San Blas islands, where the Kuna form "kwama" named the bird. The surprise lies in the route. A word from a small Central American language reached English not through Britain's colonial contact with the Caribbean or Latin America directly, but through the Spanish-speaking world that sat between them. Spanish colonists in the region adopted local bird names as they encountered new fauna, and English naturalists later borrowed many of these terms, so "guan" sits among a whole layer of New World animal words that arrived second-hand.