You wouldn’t think that an innocent phrase like bunny rabbit could contain any centuries-old mysteries, but it does! Well, sort of.
“Rabbit,” of course, refers to wooden mugs often used in the 1600s to serve beer…no, wait, never mind that; a “rabbit” is a cute, furry, long-eared fellow very fond of carrots. The word “rabbit” appeared in the Norman era in England, and is from a French/Norman root. What, you ask, did the people of England call rabbits prior to that? They didn’t call them anything at all; there weren’t any rabbits in England before they were introduced — on purpose — by the Normans. There isn’t any Gaelic or Saxon word for “rabbit”, and that’s why; they never saw rabbits. So if you’re in England, rabbits are an invasive species!
The word “bun,” which is the original version of “bunny,” was quite available well before rabbits or “rabbit” arrived. It’s from the Old English word “bune,” but it had nothing to do with small lagomorphs. It didn’t have anything to do with dinner rolls either; a “bun” was a hollow stem of a plant. What we think of as a “bun” — a small bready cake — is a different word, from the Old French “beugne.” That word also became “beignet,” which is a sweet treat like a donut that you can easily find in New Orleans but hardly anywhere else in the US. Bunny rabbits would probably like them. But back to the mystery.
The word “beugne” didn’t originally mean food; it meant swelling; like the bump that appears on Elmer Fudd when he tries to catch Bugs Bunny but gets conked on his head instead. It was the shape of the swelling that transferred the word to the hand-held edible. But the mystery comes in next: “bun” was a word used for rabbits around the 1500s, maybe because their tails have that same round shape. Except…”bun” also meant “squirrel,” and squirrels’ tails don’t have that shape at all. In fact, squirrels might have been the first of the two animals to be called “bun:” “Her Squirrell lept away..she sought to stay The little pretie Bun” (1587).
It wasn’t until the 1600s that “bunny” showed up as the cuter version of “bun”, as applied to rabbits. Now, it’s possible that the “bunny” that’s a rabbit isn’t at all connected with the “bun” that was a squirrel, a donut, and a bump on the head. Because there were two other kinds of “bunnies” too. One was a narrow canyon or ravine leading out to the ocean. There are locations in England still named things like “Chewton Bunny.”
So maybe one of those was, by chance, the place where the first Norman rabbit importers landed and made their way inland. This theory is almost entirely ridiculous, but hey, it could have happened, right?
The other kind of “bunny” was a technical term used by miners; if you found a sort of “pipe” of the ore you were looking for, but it wasn’t the main lode, that was a “bunny.” Unfortunately there isn’t any way to connect that to rabbits that isn’t vastly more farfetched than the thing about the ravines. Maybe it resembled the shape of a rabbit’s ear…?
So there you have it; the 600-year-old mystery of English rabbits and bunnies. Not to mention, if you can call the same animal a “rabbit” or a “bunny,” why the redundant “bunny rabbit”? We’ll take that up some other time, when we examine the similar conundrums “puppy dog” and “kitty cat.”
