A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
abalone
A marine snail of the genus Haliotis that clamps itself to rock in the surf zone by a single muscular foot. It has an ear-shaped shell pierced by a row of respiratory holes and lined on the inside with mother-of-pearl. Abalone graze drifting kelp rather than hunting for it — they hold up a foot and let dinner come to them. A big red abalone can span a dinner plate, and the shell’s interior throws green, pink, and violet depending on where you stand.
Etymology
American Spanish abulón, taken into English in the 1840s as a back-formed singular of the plural abulones. The Spanish had taken it from Rumsen, an Ohlone language of Monterey Bay, where aulun named the red abalone — the largest, and the one that mattered most. Monterey’s early English speakers were still calling the animal an aulone in the 1870s before the Spanish-inflected form won out. It’s one of a very small number of words English has taken from a California Indigenous language.
Notes
Rumsen divers pried abalone off the rocks with bars made from whale ribs; one recovered at Point Lobos is in the collection of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. Shell traveled hundreds of miles inland as ornaments and trade goods. Elsewhere, the animal goes by other names entirely — ormer in the Channel Islands, pāua in New Zealand, perlemoen in South Africa.