A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
whale
A whale is a fully aquatic mammal, descended from a hoofed land animal that returned to the water around fifty million years ago. The group divides into the baleen whales, which filter, and the toothed whales, which hunt and echolocate. They breathe air, are warm-blooded, bear live young, and nurse them, and the largest of them is the largest animal that has ever lived by a wide margin.
Etymology
The word is Old English and has relatives across the Germanic languages, and its further origin is unresolved. It has been used loosely for a long time: whale in older English covers walruses, large fish, and anything enormous in the sea, and the compound whale-road is one of the standard Old English poetic terms for the ocean itself.
Notes
The nearest living land relative is the hippopotamus, which is not obvious and was established by molecular work rather than by fossils, though the fossils have since caught up handsomely. A blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car and its call carries for hundreds of miles. Elsewhere here: baleen, fluke, blubber, ambergris, and whale fall.