The Bizarre Origins of the Word “Turkey”

The origin of the word “turkey” is a really fun & bizarre result of a super long game of global telephone.

Turkey the country, despite being named Turkey, has no native turkeys. On top of that, the Turks don’t call a turkey, a turkey…they call it a “Hindi”, meaning Indian because they believed the bird to come from India.

They weren’t alone in their thinking. France called the bird “poulet d’inde” or chicken from India. In Polish and Ukrainian it’s called “indyk” or Indian bird. In Russian i