Where Does the Word “Pangolin” Come From? Etymology and Names Across Languages

Few animal names carry their meaning as literally as “pangolin.” Traced to its origins, the word is essentially a description – a portrait of the animal’s most famous survival trick. From a Malay verb to European trading posts to scientific Latin, the journey of this word maps onto centuries of human encounters with one of the planet’s most extraordinary creatures. And across dozens of languages, the names people have independently coined for pangolins reveal a striking convergence: the armour, the rolling, the nocturnal mystery, and the diet are the traits that have most captured human imagination.

The Malay Root: Penggulung, the One Who Rolls

The word “pangolin” derives from the Malay word penggulung (sometimes written penggiling in older sources and tenggiling in contemporary Malay and Indonesian usage). The root is the verb gulung, meaning to roll, wind, or coil. The prefix peng- is an agent-forming prefix in Malay, transforming a verb into a noun meaning “one who [verb]s” or “the thing that [verb]s.” Penggulung therefore translates most directly as “the roller” or “one who rolls up.”

The name is an immediate, observational description of the pangolin’s primary defence mechanism. When threatened, a pangolin tucks its head into its abdomen and curls its body and scaled tail into a tight sphere. The overlapping keratin scales form an almost impenetrable outer surface, and the muscular tail locks the ball in position. To a Malay-speaking observer encountering this animal, “the roller” was both accurate and memorable – a name that required no knowledge of taxonomy, diet, or range, only direct observation of what the animal does.

Contemporary Malay still uses tenggiling as the standard common name, a variant of the same root. Indonesian, which shares deep linguistic heritage with Malay, uses the same word. In some regional Malay dialects, older forms closer to penggulung persist.

The Portuguese Connection: Malacca and the Word’s Arrival in Europe

The Malay word entered European languages through the Portuguese, who established their trading presence at Malacca – the great Malay emporium on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula – after their conquest of the city in 1511. Malacca was at that time one of the most cosmopolitan trading ports in the world, where Malay was the dominant lingua franca of commerce. Portuguese merchants, sailors, and naturalists absorbed vocabulary from Malay that they encountered nowhere else, and penggulung became pangolim in Portuguese — the phonological shift reflecting the difficulty Portuguese speakers had with the Malay nasal consonant cluster and the agent-prefix structure.

Portuguese natural history and travel writing from the sixteenth century contains some of the earliest European descriptions of pangolins, though the animals were sometimes confused with other scaled or armoured creatures. The Portuguese word pangolim was used in manuscript and printed accounts circulating among European scholars and merchants interested in the natural products of the East Indies trade.

From Portuguese, the word passed into Dutch – the other great European power in the Southeast Asian maritime trade from the seventeenth century onward – and from Dutch into English. The first documented use of a form recognisably close to “pangolin” in English dates to the eighteenth century, by which point Dutch naturalists working in the East Indies had already produced descriptions and illustrations of the animal that circulated widely in European scientific correspondence. The word had thus made a journey of roughly two centuries and passed through at least three languages before settling into English usage.

The Scientific Name Manis: Latin, Spirits, and Disputed Etymology

The genus name Manis, assigned by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, presents one of zoological nomenclature’s more intriguing etymological puzzles. Linnaeus derived the name from the Latin manes – the spirits of the dead in Roman religious tradition, the shades of ancestors who inhabited the underworld. The manes were typically conceived as benevolent or at least neutral ancestral presences, associated with the subterranean realm and with nocturnal time.

Why would Linnaeus choose such a name for a pangolin? The most plausible interpretation is that he was drawing on the animal’s nocturnal habits and its subterranean lifestyle – pangolins spend much of the day in deep burrows and emerge only at night – making an association with underworld spirits feel apt to an eighteenth-century natural historian steeped in classical literature. The creature was, in a sense, a thing of the night and the underground, like the shades of the dead. Some scholars have also suggested that the shimmering, ghost-like quality of a pangolin’s scales in moonlight may have contributed to the association, though this is more speculative.

Not all researchers accept this etymology without reservation. Alternative derivations have been proposed, including a connection to the Latin word for hand (manus), referencing the pangolin’s distinctive forelimbs with their long digging claws. However, the manes derivation is the most widely cited in the literature and is generally regarded as the most linguistically credible.

Pholidota: The Order of Scaly Things

The taxonomic order to which all pangolins belong is Pholidota, a name of Greek origin. It derives from the Greek word pholis (genitive pholidos), meaning a horny or scaly plate, and the suffix -ota, a standard Greek formation used to mean “having” or “characterised by.” Pholidota therefore translates roughly as “the scaly ones” or “those having scales.” It is a name that, like the Malay original, zeroes in on the animal’s most visually distinctive feature.

The order Pholidota contains only the family Manidae and the eight living pangolin species. Molecular phylogenetics has established that pangolins’ closest living relatives are the Carnivora – the order containing cats, dogs, bears, and seals – a relationship that was not apparent from morphology alone and that was not known when Pholidota was named.

African Genus Names: Smutsia and Phataginus

The four African pangolin species are distributed across two genera – Smutsia and Phataginus – both of which have their own etymological stories. Smutsia, containing the giant ground pangolin and the Cape pangolin (also called Temminck’s pangolin), was named in honour of Johannes Smuts (1808–1869), a South African physician and naturalist who contributed to early knowledge of South African fauna. The naming follows a common zoological convention of honouring scientists or explorers through eponymous genus names.

Phataginus, containing the tree pangolin and the long-tailed pangolin of central and west African forests, takes its name from a word of Bantu-language origin, though the precise source language and original meaning are less clearly documented in the standard nomenclatural literature. It reflects the broader taxonomic practice of drawing common names from the languages of the regions where species were first formally described.

Names Across African Languages

Across the African continent, local-language names for pangolins consistently draw on the same cluster of observable traits: the scales, the rolling behaviour, the burrowing habit, and – in some traditions – the associations with good fortune or ritual significance that pangolins hold in various cultures.

In Swahili, the widely spoken Bantu language of East Africa, the pangolin is called kakakuona. The name is often translated as “the scaly one” or, in a more literal folk etymology, as incorporating words suggesting that grandparents might be able to see or recognise it – a reference perhaps to the animal’s rarity and the knowledge needed to identify it. Kakakuona is widely used across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

In Zulu, spoken across much of southern Africa, the pangolin is known as imvavame, though the form impangele also appears in some regional contexts. In Setswana, spoken in Botswana and parts of South Africa, the animal is called kgang or kgaga. In Shona, the major Bantu language of Zimbabwe, it is known as haka or, reduplicatively, haka-haka. In Hausa, the major language of northern Nigeria and Niger, the pangolin is abunu. Yoruba, the language of southwestern Nigeria and parts of Benin and Togo, has its own name variants that vary by dialect and community.

Afrikaans, which developed in southern Africa from seventeenth-century Dutch, uses the vivid compound ietermago. This is widely etymologised as a corruption or adaptation of the phrase eet-miere, meaning “eat ants” — a name that, like the Malay original, identifies the animal by its most characteristic behaviour. An animal defined by what it eats: the pangolin as perpetual ant-consumer, forever in motion from one termite mound to the next.

Asian-Language Names and Their Meanings

Across Asia, pangolin names show a similar tendency to focus on the animal’s most striking characteristics. In Mandarin Chinese, the standard term is 窄山睄 (chuānshānijiǎ), a compound of three characters meaning respectively “pierce” or “bore through,” “mountain,” and “armour” – producing the evocative translation “the armoured one that pierces mountains.” This name references the pangolin’s powerful digging ability: with its curved forelimb claws, a pangolin can tear into concrete-hard termite mounds and burrow through compacted soil with impressive speed. The image of a scaly creature boring through a mountainside is hyperbolic but captures something true about the animal’s physical capabilities.

In Japanese, the pangolin is センザンコウ (senzankō), an adaptation of the Chinese characters and pronunciation via the Sino-Japanese reading system. In Hindi and related South Asian languages, names including sallsalab and bajrakit have been recorded, though local names vary considerably by region and community across the Indian subcontinent. In Malay and Indonesian, as noted above, tenggiling is the standard contemporary term.

How Names Reflect the Animal’s Key Traits

Looking across this global spread of names, a pattern emerges with striking clarity. The traits that human observers have most consistently chosen to encode in pangolin names are four: the rolling defence posture (Malay penggulung), the scale armour (Greek Pholidota, Chinese 睄/jiǎ), the burrowing or terrain-piercing power (Chinese 窄山/chuānshān), and the myrmecophagous (ant- and termite-eating) diet (Afrikaans ietermago). The nocturnal, subterranean quality that may underlie the Latin Manis represents a fifth, slightly more abstract quality – the animal as creature of darkness and underground.

What is notably absent from most common names is any reference to the pangolin’s size, its geographic origin, its colour, or its reproductive behaviour – the kinds of features that distinguish many other animal names. Pangolins are named for what they do and how they look at a scale of observation, not for where they live or how big they are. This consistency across cultures separated by thousands of miles and without any historical contact suggests that the pangolin’s behavioural and morphological traits are simply too striking to be overlooked: if you have seen a pangolin roll into a ball, or watched one rip open a termite mound, or run a hand across its tessellated armour, those are the things you remember and the things you name.

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