gaufre

The etymology of gopher is contested, but the leading theory traces it to French gaufre, meaning 'waffle' or 'honeycomb.' French-Canadian trappers and settlers in the Mississippi Valley may have called the burrowing rodents gaufres because their tunnel systems created a honeycomb-like pattern underground. The word was anglicized to gopher by the late 1700s.

An alternative theory connects gopher to French gouffre, meaning 'abyss' or 'deep hole,' which would reference the animal's deep burrows. A third theory suggests a Muskogean (Native American) origin. None of these theories has been definitively proven. What is clear is that the word entered American English through French colonial contact in the central continent.

Pocket gophers (family Geomyidae) are ecosystem engineers. A single gopher can move over a ton of soil per year, aerating earth and mixing nutrients. Their tunnels create microhabitats for dozens of other species. When gophers were removed from experimental plots in Kansas grasslands in the 1980s, plant diversity dropped by 50 percent within three years.

The University of Minnesota adopted the gopher as mascot in 1857, the same year Minnesota became a state. Mark Twain used 'gopher' as slang for a Minnesotan. In 1991, the Gopher protocol—an early internet system developed at the University of Minnesota—briefly competed with the World Wide Web before losing. The mascot gave its name to the technology, and the technology gave its name to the Go programming language's mascot.