wordaday

There’s universal agreement today that a Penguin is:

Any of various stout flightless marine birds of the family Spheniscidae, of cool regions of the Southern Hemisphere, having flipperlike wings and webbed feet adapted for swimming and diving, and short scalelike feathers that are white in front and black on the back.

But not too long ago, penguin was used for a Great Auk as well.

It’s likely that penguin is of Welsh origin; it breaks down very neatly into pen + gwen/gwyn, with pen meaning “head,” and gwen meaning “white,” and there are species of penguin with white heads.

However, the etymology isn’t at all certain. The OED offers two early quotations in context:

1577 F. FLETCHER Log of ‘Golden Hind’ 24 Aug. in N. M. Penzer World Encompassed (1971) 128 Infinite were the Numbers of the foule, wch the Welsh men name Pengwin & Maglanus tearmed them Geese. c1588 N. H. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations (1589) III. 809 The Port of Desire… In this place we had gulles, puets, penguyns, and seales in aboundance.

The OED then notes:

It appears that the name was first given to the Great Auk of the seas of Newfoundland . . .
The penguin resembles the Great Auk closely both in appearance and in its habits. Both birds are large, flightless waterfowl with similar black and white coats adapted to life in circumpolar waters. It is therefore possible that the penguin, which was first named thus by British sailors, was mistaken for the Great Auk, or that a term for the most similar known bird was applied (compare Magellan’s reported use of ‘geese’: see quot. 1577 at sense 1a).
The attribution of the name penguin to ‘the Welsh men’ . . . and its explanation as Welsh pen gwyn white head, appears also in Ingram’s Narrative, and later in Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels (in the edition of 1634 as a surmise, and in the edition of 1638 as an accepted fact). Since the bird was known in the far north of Europe under a different name (see GARE-FOWL n.), it is likely that the term penguin originated in North America. However, the Great Auk did not have a white head (though it had large white spots in front of the eyes).
Most references to Penguin Island in Newfoundland are due to Hakluyt (compare quot 1578 at sense 2).

Nonetheless, a Welsh derivation does seem to be the most reasonable.

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