OT as per LH policy: Sharks are rich in urea (~piss) -- it functions to balance osmotic pressure against seawater. You therefore have to prepare them for cooking in a special way. I failed to do so once and got mildly nauseated. The End.

It so happens that modern non-rhotic BrE shark is pronounced rather like modern AmE shock. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the quality of the Mayan vowel in xoc and the rhoticity of Elizabethan English.

Maybe someday I could be like MMcM...

Roger: The same thought occurred to me; I'm pretty sure r's were strongly pronounced in the 16th century, which is at least as big a problem with the etymology as the transmission chain.

Conrad: Then you'll have to stop getting your etymologies from Isidore of Seville, won't you?

The correct Portuguese word for shark is tubarão not tuburão.

"from Isidore of Seville"

But he's so old!

John Emerson:
To equate urea to urine is misleading, to put it kindly. Take a look at its many uses, for example on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea

I wonder where German Hai and French requin come from...

Uses of urea? The most beautiful one is for annihilating nitrite out of solutions. You pour the white powder in by the spoonful, and it disappears, producing lots of bubbles. :-)

Well, "~" is not "=". Urea is present in urine, and to me, not appetizing.

The only exception is good gorgonzola cheese, with it's faint whiff of the barn floor. I do not share L. Bloom's taste for kidneys.

"its"

That's right, Luguburt. As confirmed by the Wikipedia article you direct us to, pure urea is a white, tasteless, odourless, solid, with a melting point of 132.7 °C. It is not the urea in urine that is offensive to the senses. There is a, um, cock-tale of chemicals in mammalian urine to account for its distincktive odour, including some ammonia (more strongly in the human infant product, I seem to recall). And the Wikipedia article reminds us that fish generally, including sharks, excrete ammonia instead of urea.

What about the shark in loanshark? That seems closer in sense to the obsolete English word shark than the fish.

OTOH, both words have a predatory sense, and metaphorically, a shark is much like a shark, and vice versa.

Is there a recognized phenomenon in which two unrelated yet similar words can converge into one modern sense? And if so, how much sense does it make to claim a single etymology? It seems to me that there a many examples where one could claim a "forked" etymology, if I may call it that.

(Re. sharks and ammonia: I find that a citrus marinade takes away the ammonia flavor, but if you're going to deep-fry the shark, buttermilk is good. Mmmmm.... shark.)

Thanks. It's mostly tracking down the articles and works they reference online and in Boston libraries.

rhoticity: Jones mentions Thompson's classic demonstration of what he called “rebus writing” with xoc 'shark' and 'count'. This book goes one further and says that Thompson claimed the etymology in his Maya Hieroglyphs Without Tears. If so, it might be relevant (to the development of the theory, not its historical truth) that he was a Londoner. The book is a Cold War oddity, in part his last salvo against the Russian phonetic scheme. Coe, who started us on this shark hunting expedition, compares it to the works of Athanasius Kircher (who might be a hero of regular LH readers), since it's nicely designed (by the BM) but wrong. I thought I used to have a copy, but it's not on the right shelf and LT says I don't. Well, the internet will sell me one with more than half going to postage.

tubarão: Thank you. I felt comfortable fixing obvious errors and ones where I had the text in front of me. But here I wasn't sure of historical or dialectal issues. No doubt it's just Jones' typo.

requin: Castro mentions the theory that it's from requiem, because ‘Quand il a saisi un homme ... il ne reste plus qu’à faire chanter le Requiem pour le repos de l’âme de cet homme là’. (Rey. Le dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise. 1992 p. 1178) Other possibilities are some form of chien.

Hai: There's a cognate hár in Old Norse.

That sounds like one for my shelf...

loan-shark is indeed an interesting case.

The OED makes a distinction between the predatory sense of metaphorical sharks (1 sense 2) and the sponging parasite (2). The first quotation it has is from 1905, in a temperance parody that plays on the nautical sense. That would be more conclusive of the coining if it weren't possible to find earlier uses in Google Books from 1905, 1904, and 1891. (Dates aren't reliable in Google Books, but the title pages look legit.) But it is one more thing in favor of the metaphor, if it is even possible to distinguish.

This is my first visit to this site (I followed a link from wordorigins.org). I have nothing to add to the etymology of 'shark,'but I do have a question for MMcM: Do your friends call you "2900"?

2900? Would you believe that joke's thirty years old? Maybe Gosper started it. So I did put it in the ITS nickname field. But no, not really.

Wow, thanks.

The most exotic etymology I can think of is "sack", supposedly from the Assyrian.

You'd better drink some sack and put the vowels back in your cheeks.

Th Hbrws and rbs r rght bt vwls.

How are the 'orbs' right about vowels?? Or did you mean 'ribs'? Either way you're just babeling.

How are the 'orbs' right about vowels?? Or did you mean 'rubes'? Either way you're just babeling.

"and" S/B "nd". W rgrt th rrr.

Rth s nt-smtc.

Cmpltly drppng ll vwls s myb nt a gd ide, bt t's srprsng hw lgbl Englsh wth mst vwls drppd s (tht s f mny intl and sm fnl vwls r stll wrttn).

m nt nt-smtc! 'm vry dfntly phlsmtc. th prblm s tht f yr gnn drp vwls, y hv t pt n th nqqd. bt wht nxt, shll w dpt a syllbry? r cnfrm?

Ggll