Where did the name Odobenus rosmarus (Walrus) came from?
The compound Odobenus comes from odous (Greek for “tooth”) and baino (Greek for “walk”), based on observations of walruses using their tusks to pull themselves out of the water. The term divergens in Latin means “turning apart”, referring to the tusks. The origin of the word ‘walrus’ has variously been attributed to combinations of the Dutch words walvis (“whale”) and ros (“horse”) or wal (“shore”) and reus (“giant”).However, the most likely origin of the word is the Old Norse hrossvalr, meaning “horse-whale”, which was passed in a juxtaposed form to Dutch and the North-German dialects as walros and Walross. The now archaic English word for walrus—morse—is widely supposed to have come from the Slavic.Thus морж (morž) in Russian, mors in Polish, also mursu in Finnish, moršâ in Saami, later morse in French, morsa in Spanish, morsă in Romanian etc. I haven’t found any etymology on ‘rosmarus’ but it looks like ‘ros’ Russian + ‘marus’ sea.
