zebra

The zebra's name began on the Iberian Peninsula, not the African savanna. Medieval Portuguese and Spanish documents mention the zebro or cebro, a now-extinct wild ass that roamed the scrublands of Iberia until hunting and habitat loss eliminated it around the 15th century. This animal gave its name to an entire continent's striped horse.

When Portuguese sailors reached the Congo coast in the 1480s and then Angola in the early 1500s, they encountered a striped horse unlike anything in Europe. The resemblance to the vanished zebro was enough: they named it zebra and wrote it into their expedition logs. Duarte Lopes's 1591 report on the Congo kingdom to Pope Gregory XIV is one of the earliest written records of the animal with this name.

English borrowed zebra from Portuguese by 1600, appearing in animal encyclopedias as a wilde asse with stripes. The word carried its Portuguese spelling intact, which is why the z sounds as /z/ in English but as /s/ in Portuguese. By the 17th century, zebras were being shipped to European royal menageries as diplomatic gifts.

The original Iberian zebro has no living descendants; the African zebra inherited only its name. Genetic studies show the Iberian animal was likely Equus hydruntinus, a species that diverged from donkeys some 2 million years ago. The African zebra belongs to a separate lineage entirely, making the naming a case of mistaken family resemblance preserved in language.