Etymology Dictionary

CANNIBAL,  one who eats human-flesh.  (Span.,—W. Indian.)   A corrupt form; it should rather be caribal.   'The Caribes I learned to be men-eaters or canibals, and great enemies to the islanders of Trinidad;' Hackluyt, Voyages, vol. iii. p. 576 (R.); a passage imitated in Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. W. Clark, 1866, p. 126.   See Shak. Oth. i. 3. 143.—Span. canibal, a cannibal, savage; a corruption of Caribal, a Carib, the form used by Columbus; see Trench, Study of Words.   B. This word being ill understood, the spelling was changed to canibal to give a sort of sense, from the notion that the cannibals had appetites like a dog; cf. Span. canino, canine, voracious, greedy.   As the word canibal was unmeaning in English, a second n was introduced to make the first vowel short, either owing to accent, or from some notion that it ought to be shortened.   C. The word Canibal occurs in the following qutotation from Herrera's Descripcion de las Indias Occidentales, vol. i. p. 11. col. 1, given in Todd's Johnson.   'Las Islas qui estan desde la Isla de San Juan de Porto rico al oriente de ella, para la costa de Tierra-Firme, se Ilamaron los Canibales por los muchos Caribes, comedores de carne humana, que truvo en ellas, i segun se interpreta en su lengua Canibal, quiere decir "hombre valiente," porque por tales eran tenidos de los otros Indios.'   I.e. 'the islands lying next to the island of San Juan de Porto-rico [now called Porto Rico] to the East of it, and extending towards the coast of the continent [of South America] are called Canibales because of the many Caribs, eaters of human flesh, that are found in them, and according to the interpretation of their language Canibal is as much as to say 'valiant man,' because they were held to be such by the other Indians.'   This hardly sufficiently recognises the fact that Canibal and Carib are mere variants of one and the same word; but we learn that the West Indian word Carib meant, in the language of the natives, 'a valiant man.'   Other testimony is to the same effect; and it is well ascertained that cannibal is equivalent to Carib or Caribbean, and that the native sense of the word is 'a valiant man,' widely different from that which Europeans have given it.   The familiar expression 'king of the cannibal islands' really means 'king of the Caribbean islands.'   Der. cannibal-ism.