Your Thanksgiving Turkey Isn't Called A Turkey

How Every Culture Got the Turkey's Origins Completely Wrong, Including the Country of Turkey

The bird at the center of your Thanksgiving feast has one of the most fascinating naming stories in history. It's a tale of colonial confusion that spans continents and cultures, each convinced they knew where this mysterious bird originated, but each one more wrong than the last.

The turkey’s name is the result of probably the world’s longest game of telephone gone wrong, involving colonial history, global trade, and the human tendency to name unfamiliar things after distant lands. And it all starts with the country of Turkey.

Despite its name, Turkey has no native turkeys and the Turkish people don’t call a turkey, a turkey.

They call the bird a “Hindi”, meaning Indian, because they believed the bird originally came from India. Interestingly, the Turks were not alone in this thinking and caused a linguistic daisy chain that extended across Europe.

For example, the French called the bird "poulet d'Inde" (literally Indian chicken), while Dutch traders named it "kalkoen", which is a contraction of Calicut-hoen, meaning Calicut Hen after Calcutta or Kolkata, a major commercial hub of the Indian subcontinent at the time.

Then Eastern Europeans joined the confusion—Poles and Ukrainians settled on "indyk," while the Russians chose “indyushka”, both meaning "Indian bird." Even in Hebrew the name for the bird translates as “tarnagol hodu”, meaning chicken of India.

With all that in mind, the next natural question would be, what is this bird called in India?

This is where the irony compounds, because in India the bird is called “peru”, a country where turkey’s are also not native. It’s believed this word was passed through the Portuguese who colonized parts of India during this time period.

This incorrect naming continues through Southeast Asia, where colonial influences left their mark: Malaysians know it as “ayam belander” meaning "Dutch chicken," while Cambodians call it “moan barang” meaning "French chicken," who were colonized by the Dutch and French respectively at this time.

At the root of this confusion lies Columbus's famous geographical error—his incorrect notion that he had reached India rather than North America. But, it was too late, the belief stuck. This misconception created a nomenclature that reflected the era's limited geographical knowledge and Europe-centric worldview.

Ultimately, each culture named the bird after where they thought it came from. The English thought it came from Turkey, the Turks thought it came from India, the Indians named it after Peru, and meanwhile, it was American all along.

The true origins of the “turkey” trace back to the Aztecs, who had domesticated these birds a millennia before the Europeans ever stepped foot on the soil. They called the bird "huehxolotl”, which loosely translates to "big monster”.

So, this Thursday enjoy eating your “big monster” at dinner tonight and Happy Thanksgiving!