Found while snorkeling in Key West, FL.
Ok, and who came up with such a stupid name for a shark?
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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So, I looked it up out of curiosity and the three most common explanations for the name “nurse shark” are 1) “the sucking sound they make when hunting for prey in the sand, which vaguely resembles that of a nursing baby.” 2) “derived from an archaic word, nusse, meaning cat shark.” 3) “Coming from the Old English word for sea-floor shark: hurse” Link
If you think that’s odd, you’ll find bird names even more entertaining :)
It’s cool that you were able to get so close to one, OP.
nusse, meaning cat shark
Ok, so there is a possibility that the nurse shark has its strange name because it resembles an old name of this shark: cat shark which it completely normal for a shark. Cat shark. Ok. Normal. Cool.
Yeah someone made a bad call there. Just call the damn thing a cat shark.
I do love some bush tits and don't get me started on dem booby
Did you find any convincing linguistic or etymological source for nusse? I can find a lot of near-verbatim articles repeating it, including the NatGeo article you've linked, but nothing independent and scholarly about the word.
Yeah, I failed to see the connection to cats too. Another article says nusse is a general name for large fish such as sharks. Link
There is also a different kind of shark called a catshark but they don’t look at all like nurse sharks.
Ok, now we're cooking with gas! They cite The Sharks of North America (Castro, 2011) which says:
The name "nurse" comes from "nusse," meaning fish, which appears in print as early as 1440 in the Promptorium Parvulorum, an early English/Latin dictionary. [...] "Nuses were there so plentie, that they would scarcely suffer any other fish to come neere the hookes" (Hakluyt 1589).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "nusse" is derived from the earlier "huss," the ancient name for the catsharks
The Promptorium Parvulorum has an entry for husk:
Husk of fyshe: Squamus, -i; Masc.,
with a note against that entry:
'Huske, fyshe,' Harl, some kind of fish.
- 'Hush, the Lump, a fish,' JAMIESON.
- 'Husse, a fysshe : rousette,' PALSGRAVE.
- 'Huss, the dogfish,' HALLIWELL.
So we have to trust the OED about the transformation from huss to nuss. I guess it could be the classic misdivision/rebracketing ("an huss" becoming "a nuss") that gives us "nickname" and "newt".