el lagarto

The word 'alligator' is a mangled borrowing of the Spanish phrase 'el lagarto,' meaning 'the lizard.' Spanish colonizers and explorers encountering American crocodilians in the sixteenth century did not have a word for them, so they applied the nearest European category: lagarto, a general Spanish term for lizard, derived from the Latin lacertus. The definite article el fused with the noun in English ears — a process called agglutination of the article, also seen in Arabic loanwords — and el lagarto gradually became 'allagarto,' then 'alagarto,' and finally 'alligator' in seventeenth-century English. The word is first recorded in English around 1568, in accounts of Florida and the Caribbean.

The Spanish word lagarto itself carries a longer lineage. The Latin lacertus meant lizard but also, by metaphorical extension, a muscle — the Romans saw the rippling movement of a muscle as resembling a small lizard darting beneath the skin. The word survives in English 'lacertilian' (pertaining to lizards) and in the anatomical prefix lacer-. The Spanish form lagarto also appears in the name Lagarto de Indias, which early Spanish texts use for the American species, distinguishing them from European lizards by their geography. An alternate Spanish name, caimán, from a Carib or Arawak word, was also used and survived in the English 'caiman' for the South American species.

Alligators themselves are among the most ancient surviving reptile lineages, essentially unchanged since the Miocene epoch. Two species exist: the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) of the southeastern United States, and the critically endangered Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis) of the Yangtze River basin. The American alligator's range across Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas meant it was among the first large American wildlife to be documented by European colonizers, and the Spanish explorers of the Hernando de Soto expedition (1539–1542) encountered them extensively.

The word 'alligator' spawned a small family of compounds. 'Alligator pear' was the English name for the avocado from the seventeenth to early twentieth century, the bumpy green skin thought to resemble alligator hide. 'Alligator clip' (the serrated metal clamp) and 'alligator shoes' joined the lexical family later. In American English 'alligator' became, briefly, part of 1950s teen slang — 'see you later, alligator' answered by 'in a while, crocodile' — which may be the most improbable afterlife any Spanish noun-plus-article construction has ever had.