In a Word: Kiwi: The Bird, a People, and Their Fruit

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We may never have a satisfying answer. But we don’t have the same problem with a chicken-sized antipodean bird and a fuzzy egg-sized fruit that bear the same name, along with the humans that live alongside them.

So, which came first, the kiwi, the kiwi, or the Kiwi? And how are they connected?

First came the bird, specifically any of five species of small brown flightless birds native to New Zealand. The bird’s genus name is Apteryx, from Greek a- “without” and pteryx “wing,” but that’s a misnomer. Kiwi do have small, vestigial wings, but they are hard to see beneath their hairlike feathers. The word kiwi comes from Maori and is thought to have simply been imitative of the call of the male kiwi. The first known use of kiwi in English texts is from 1835.

Some years later, in 1907, the Colony of New Zealand officially became the Dominion of New Zealand after some politicking. It was, of course, a dominion of the British Empire, which means that when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, New Zealand was obligated to participate. The nickname Kiwi — because of the bird — was adopted by New Zealand soldiers during World War I to describe themselves. (It’s so much short than “New Zealander.”) After the war, Kiwi proliferated as a nickname for all New Zealanders.

So the bird came first, then the nickname.

Lastly came the fruit, which, though it had existed for hundreds of years, wasn’t called a kiwi until the mid-20th century. The fruit, and the shrub from which it grows, came from China, where it is called yang tao. First introduced into New Zealand in 1906, it was called the Chinese gooseberry because it resembled the gooseberry and, well, it was from China. The kiwi, however, is not a true gooseberry. That early fruit from the beginning of the 20th century wasn’t quite like the fuzzy fruit we know today; for one, it was smaller then. Years of horticultural development — especially by a man named Haywood Wright — turned out a larger, more luscious hybrid fruit still known as the Haywood variety. New Zealand began exporting this new crop in 1953, still calling it the Chinese gooseberry, a name without any reference to its source in New Zealand.

It didn’t sell well, and so it was — as we say in modern times — rebranded. No one knows for sure who came up with the idea to capitalize on the Kiwi nickname, but the kiwifruit was apparently much more appealing to consumers than the Chinese gooseberry. That green (and sometimes golden) berry with the black seeds and fuzzy gray-brown skin is still technically called the kiwifruit, though colloquially, it’s just a kiwi.

An unexpected aspect of this three-in-one word is how it is pluralized. Following Maori morphology, kiwi is typically both singular and plural for both the bird and the fruit: “I saw two kiwi standing atop a massive pile of kiwi.” The nickname, however, is normally pluralized in the English fashion, with an added -s: “The regiment included two dozen Kiwis.”