bitela

Old English bitela is derived from bītan, meaning 'to bite.' The word is a straightforward agent noun: a beetle is a thing that bites. This is not entirely accurate — of the roughly 400,000 known beetle species, most are herbivores that chew plant matter rather than biting in any way a human would notice. But the Anglo-Saxons encountered the stag beetle and the ground beetle first, and these do bite. The name generalized from the painful exceptions to the harmless majority.

Beetles are the most species-rich order of any organism on earth. Coleoptera — from Greek koleos (sheath) and pteron (wing) — contains more described species than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane, asked what his study of nature told him about the Creator, allegedly replied that God had 'an inordinate fondness for beetles.' Whether Haldane actually said this is disputed. The line has survived because it captures a real fact: beetles are a quarter of all known animal species.

The Volkswagen Beetle, designed by Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s, was named Käfer (beetle) by the German public, not by the manufacturer. Hitler wanted to call it the KdF-Wagen, after Kraft durch Freude, the Nazi leisure organization. The public ignored this and called it what it looked like. The English name Beetle followed. A car shaped like an insect got the insect's name. Porsche's design is gone from production. The nickname outlived the politics.

The word beetle has also existed as a separate English word meaning a heavy mallet or hammer, from Old English bēatan (to beat). This beetle — the tool — has no connection to the insect. English happened to have two unrelated words that looked identical, and the insect won the popular imagination. Nobody thinks of a mallet when they hear beetle. They think of the biter that mostly does not bite.