English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
According to Wikipedia, a roe deer is
a small, nimble Eurasian deer with no visible tail, a white rump patch, and a reddish summer coat that turns grey in winter, the male having short three-pointed antlers (source)
Why are such deers called "roe" deers? I found that "roe" only means the eggs of fish, the sperm of certain fish or the ovaries of certain crustaceans.
There are two words written "roe" - they are homonyms (words of different origin that look and sound the same).
So, "roe" meaning "fish eggs" is one word, and "roe" meaning roe deer is another, unrelated word. Both are of Germanic origin, but they have different roots.
For the name of the deer, the terms "roe" and "roe deer" have coexisted since the Old English period. ("Old English" with a capital "O" is the name for the English language as spoken pre-1066, also known as "Anglo-Saxon".)
"Roe" and the "roe" of "roe deer" have the same Germanic root, but it is unclear whether "roe deer" was coined in Old English (by combining "roe" with "deer") or borrowed from Norse (the ancestor language of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese and Icelandic; Norse was spoken by Danish settlers in some parts of early medieval England).
The reason for the continued existence of the term "roe deer" alongside the simpler term "roe" is probably that it's much clearer, given that "roe" is a monosyllable with other meanings (and also sounds identical to the word "row" in some of its meanings), and given that most people don't discuss deer that often.
(Note: In both Old English and Old Norse, "deer" just meant an animal, not necessarily a deer. "Roe" was the name of the specific animal. In origin, though, "roe" was probably a colour reference, possibly meaning "swarthy", "dusky" or "brownish".)
The reason for the continued existence of the term "roe deer" alongside the simpler term "roe" is probably that it's much clearer, given that "roe" is a monosyllable with other meanings (and also sounds identical to the word "row" in some of its meanings), and given that most people don't discuss deer that often.
Indeed, if you go back to the time when people did frequently discuss deer, you find that they even had different monosyllabic words for different kinds of deer: notably hart and hind for (male and female) red deer, versus buck and doe for (male and female) fallow and roe deer — not to mention fawn, stag, staggart, brocket (red), pricket and sorel (fallow), and so on. There's a neat little table on this page.
Relatedly, the word deer started out meaning simply "any kind of animal"; Online Etymological Dictionary says: "The sense specialization to a specific animal began in Old English (the usual Old English word for what we now call a deer was heorot; see hart), was common by 15c., and is now complete." (I have to keep reminding myself that deer is not a cognate of Latin -therium, though; different PIE root.)
On roe itself, Online Etymological Dictionary says: "Old English ra, from raha, from Proto-Germanic *raikhaz, of uncertain origin; perhaps from PIE root *rei- "streaked, spotted, striped in various colors."
The other species being "red deer" and "fallow deer," it does seem like "roe deer" refers to coloration. ("Red" and "fallow" both refer explicitly to coloration.)
Also relevant: the archaic use of the male form to refer to any group. So when Deut. 14:5 talks about "the hart, and the roe-buck, and the fallow deer," or when 1 Kings 4:23 says Solomon had "an hundred sheep, beside harts, and roe-bucks, and fallow-deer," it doesn't mean that he had only male red deer and roe deer; "obviously" what applies to harts applies equally to hinds. But it does mean that frequently we'd say "roe-buck" or "roe-bucks" in places where it might be ambiguous, rather than "roe deer," leaving "roe" only for places where the context is unambiguous and/or we're talking specifically about female roes (e.g. the Song of Solomon).
