#2: Sporðdreki

And now it's time for one of my favorite things ever-- today's word is sporðdreki, the Icelandic word for scorpion. I've been fascinated with scorpions for a long time now, and have been keeping select species in captivity since my freshman year of college. If everything goes as planned, one day I will conduct independent research on their behavior/evolution and eventually become the scorpion guy. But enough about that. It's interesting that there is a native Icelandic word for "scorpion" to begin with, as scorpions are not found in Iceland or anywhere remotely near the Arctic Circle for that matter.

For most Icelanders, this is a word that is probably restricted to textbooks, museum displays, and nature documentaries. And so, you'd be forgiven for expecting a somewhat recent coinage based on the more commonplace English "scorpion" or Latin "scorpio." Indeed, this is the case in other Nordic languages such as Danish and Norwegian. But Icelanders are protective of their language, and there is a very strong tendency to stay away from loanwords and foreign roots; if a new word is needed, it is almost always formed from native Old Norse roots instead. And that is what happened here.

The word sporðdreki literally means "tail dragon" (it's a compound of sporður, "tail" and drekar, "dragon") and, quite frankly, I love that. It's cutely offbeat but at the same time entirely appropriate. To their prey items, scorpions must certainly appear to be ferocious, terrifying monsters-- not unlike mythical dragons-- and they are known for their conspicuous, venom-bearing tails! By analogy, pseudoscorpions (a related but distinct group of arachnids that lack a tail but otherwise resemble scorpions) are known simply as drekar ("dragons"), or sporðdrekar sans sporðar. It's such an awesome term that some people are even attempting to adopt it into English as a calque!

Pictured above: several varieties of dragon.

WORD SUMMARY:
sporðdrek/i, -a, -ar (m): scorpion

Posted in: Animals, Compound Words, Nouns