centaur

There may be no etymological connection between centaur and minotaur despite the fact it seems like a given that there would be, seeing as how they’re both animal-human hybrids. The etymology of minotaur is pretty straightforward: from Minos, the king of Crete in the story of how the minotaur came to be, and tauros, “bull.” But centaur isn’t so easy. It’s been in use in English to mean “horse on bottom, man on top” since the 1300s, from the Latin centaurus, which in turn comes from a word of unknown origin: Kentauros, which first referred to horse-riding warriors and later a race of half-horse, half-man creatures. Wikipedia points out that there is a popular but false etymology stating that centaur comes from ken + tauros, “piercing bull.”

I’d wondered if maybe the word part -taur had come to refer to animal-human hybrids, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, aside from Motaur, from the Progressive Insurance commercials, and the onocentaur, a donkey-human hybrid from Greek mythology that I’d never heard of before and which happens to be one of the more pathetic mythological creatures I’ve ever heard of. It only has two legs, as opposed to four legs like centaurs have, which just seems impractical and unbalanced, if maybe more anatomically sensible.