Entomological Etymology 1: ants
I’m Taylor Hart, and this is Entomological Etymology!
Let’s start with the word “ant,” everyone knows it. I’m talking about the insect here, not my lovely Aunt Karen. “Ant” has a Germanic origin: Online Etymology Dictionary traces “ant” to the Old English “æmmette”.1 This ancestral word led to an alternate modern English form, “emmet”. When I learned this, I got excited: Does the name “Emmett” mean “ant”? Unfortunately not, since it comes from a different Old German root “ermen,” meaning “whole”. Still, I guess that makes “Emmett” a bit of an “ant-ish” name. Anyway, “æmmette” can be traced back even farther, to a West Germanic word “emaitjon”. This compound word comes from roots “e-”, for off, and “mai”, meaning cut. OEM translates this original version of “ant” as meaning, “the biter-off”. The root “mai” goes back all the way to Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue for languages from English, to Greek, to Persian, to Hindi. “Mai” has another descendant in modern english: the word “maim”. I guess the Germans had some bad experiences with ants!
But ant scientists are still scientists, and we like to use fancy Greek and Latin words to describe things. Ant scientists call themselves myrmecologists, from the Greek “myrmecos” meaning ant, and “-ology”, meaning study of. “Myrmecos” has one other descendent word in English, which is “myrmidon”. Myrmidon means a type of brutally subordinate soldier.2 It sounds like the Greeks didn’t have great relationships with ants, either. Personally I’ve been lucky, I’ve only got a few small scars from rough encounters with fire ants!
For ants, the colony is family, the colony is life. They’re tribal in that way. Many species will ruthlessly defend their nest and territory against intruders, and some species have specialized “soldier” type individuals. These are a sub-group of worker ants that are bigger and better at fighting. Some ants are incredibly aggressive. Eciton burchelii army ants are nomadic and forage in huge raiding parties to feed their populations of hundreds of thousands of ants. Their soldiers have incredible jaws!
Some ants defend their colonies with a nasty acid spray of a chemical called “formic acid”. And this gives us one more ant-ish word for today. “Formic” comes from “formica”, the Latin word for ant! So there you go. Keep your antennae up for more entomological etymology!
Harper, Douglas. “Ant” entry, Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/ant
Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/myrmidon
