On big and little foxes

This is a story about how the fox got its name. I discussed the word fox ten years ago (see the post for March 23, 2016), but today I have more to say about the subject.

Rudyard Kipling devoted many wonderful pages to elephants, camels, porcupines, and other animals in his Just So Stories but neglected the fox. Yet over the centuries and millennia, no other beast has engaged people’s imagination more than the fox. Wikipedia has an entry on Joel Chandler Harris’s 1880 book about the Br’er Rabbit cycle (Br’er “brother”), but the author of the entry did not mention the readership of that book abroad. Yet it so happened that in 1936 the book was translated into Russian, became immensely popular, and I grew up reading it.

Surprisingly, during my many years of teaching folklore at the University of Minnesota, I don’t remember meeting anyone who knew those tales. It may be different in the south. The fictional Uncle Remus was a slave from Alabama entertaining the owner’s son. This context is revolting, but the tales are wonderful. In the twentieth century, researchers of oral tradition studied African folklore very well, and some sceptics’ idea that Harris fabricated the tales was refuted once and for all. Analogs of those animal tales are known very well, though in Africa, the rabbit’s counterpart turned out to be the antelope.

Br’er Rabbit is a brilliant trickster. His main enemy is Br’er Fox, whom he always outwits. Yet elsewhere in the wide world of folklore, it is the fox that emerges as the prototypical trickster. In the oldest Indo-European languages, the word for “fox” is most often feminine (so, for example, in Greek, Latin, and Slavic, though not in Sanskrit), as opposed to wolf and bear. The same holds for some other language groups. It is unclear why, but Slavic provides a classic example of the situation. Thus, the Russian for “fox” is lisa (stress on the second syllable). The final vowel a marks the feminine gender, and the ending was cut off from this noun, to produce the fox’s masculine counterpart; hence lis, a dead born creation.

Why does the word for “fox” so often belong to the feminine gender? The old hypothesis—that the fox “lacked courage” and for that reason was thought of as a woman—lacks merit. Oral tradition depicts women as dangerous, nearly invincible warriors and certainly not as “the weaker sex.” We also read that great wars were fought on account of women, who either provoked deadly strife or were abducted. As matters stand, we have no answer to the question about why fox ended up as a feminine noun. In one of the Grimms’ tales, we encounter Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox, and Mr. Fox has nine tails.

Be that as it may, the Germanic form for “fox” was indeed feminine. The noun in the text of the fourth-century Gothic Bible (the oldest long text in Germanic) is fauho (au had the value of o in Engl. fox). In English, s was added to the root foh-, the result being fohs, that is, fox. That s marked the masculine gender! For instance, one of the Old Icelandic cognates of the animal name bear (Old English bera) is bersi (that is, ber-s-i). To repeat, once s was added to the old root foh, the fox became a he. (This was a more complicated process than the one in Russian: see above!)

The great protagonist of the German/Dutch/French epic Reineke Fox ~ Reintje (Reinaert) de Vos ~ Roman de Renart is a male, and a very aggressive one. (Note the Dutch form Vos: we will need it below.) In the spirit of medieval romances, he, we presume, is perhaps the queen’s (the lioness’s) lover. The great William Caxton, whose command of Dutch was near-native, wrote a delightful English version of the tale. It was published in 1481, but two Modern English versions of it exist.

There is no grammatical gender in English. Yet the fox may perhaps be categorized as a male, because it has a female counterpart, namely vixen, though in our linguistic intuition, fox and vixen are hardly connected. Also, I think we more often hear about a vixen (if we at all do) as about a cantankerous woman, a shrew, than about an animal. Yet vixen is originally a she-fox. If vixen began with an f, the tenuous tie between it and fox may have been retained.

German Füchsin throws some light on vixen, whose earliest recorded form was fyxen (indeed, an adjective “belonging to a fox,” rather than a noun). The main puzzle is of course why vixen begins with a v. The Dutch for “fox” is vos, and we can see that its v is not accidental. In Dutch, initial f was voiced regularly, but in England this change affected only some dialects in the Southwest. A few of those forms made their way into the dialect that became the foundation of Modern “Standard” English. Hence vat, veneer, vial, and a few more words that could have been expected to begin with an f.

The last (but the main!) question is, naturally, about the origin (etymology) of Gothic fauho, that is, foho. According to most authorities, light comes from words like Russian pukh “a covering of fluffy feathers” (Germanic f regularly corresponds to non-Germanic p: cf. my perennial example, Latin pater versus English father). A congener of pukh is a Sanskrit word meaning “tail”. In light of such cognates the fox emerges as an animal with a bushy tail. Few other suggestions are hardly more convincing.

There is only one point I may add here. Dictionaries usually say that coinages like “fluffy” or “having a long tail” are taboo words. Animals were often given names to deceive their bearers, because if one said (pronounced) wolf or bear, the beast might take the utterance for an invitation and arrive. But why should “fluffy” or “long-tailed” be taboo names? They are mere descriptions. When in Russian the bear is called medved “one knowing honey,” that is indeed a taboo name, but “long-tailed” or “fluffy”? After all, people had to call the fox something! To be sure, fox may not even be an Indo-European word. If so, its origin will remain hidden from us for all times. But such is often the situation with ancient words.

POSTSCRIPT: A QUESTION AND A COMMENT

QUESTION. What is the origin of the German noun Ereignis “event, occurrence”? This word has a bizarre history. The verb ereignen “to put in sight; present before the eyes” goes back to Old High German irougen. The root of the word is ouge “eye” (Modern Gernat Auge). This irougen later became eröugnen and still later ereignen. Today, ereignen looks like a verb related to eigen “one’s own,” but despite this association, the word managed to reteam its old meaning (-nis is a suffix in the noun Ereignis).

COMMENT. Professor Gavin Wraith cited a Hittite noun for “libation” in connection with my discussion of sp-words (see the post “Supper with an Etymologist” for August 12, 2026). I cannot judge whether the connection is valid, but I would not be surprised if here we indeed had another sp-word for sipping, supping, and the like.

_{Featured image: Brer Rabbit turnt ‘er aloose. Public domain via Picryl.}