A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
jaguar
The jaguar is the largest cat in the Americas, heavier and more thickly built than a leopard, marked with rosettes that carry spots inside them where a leopard’s do not. It has the strongest bite for its size of any big cat and uses it differently from the others, killing by biting straight through the skull rather than by the throat. It swims readily and hunts caiman, turtles, and fish.
Etymology
The word came into English through Portuguese from Tupi, a language of coastal Brazil, where it named this animal. It is usually given as meaning something like the beast that kills in a single bound, though the reading is debated. The Tupi word was general enough that Portuguese speakers used it for other predators, too, which is why some early accounts are hard to pin to a species.
Notes
The jaguar is the animal at the center of Mesoamerican religion and art, from the Olmec onward, and appears in stone, jade, and codices over three thousand years. Its northern range once reached well into the American Southwest, and individual males still occasionally cross into Arizona and New Mexico from Sonora, where they are photographed by trail cameras and given names.