You might have thought card sharks and loan sharks were named after the predatory fish, but apparently there’s a decent chance...
You might have thought card sharks and loan sharks were named after the predatory fish, but apparently there’s a decent chance it’s the other way around from an old Dutch word meaning “person that takes unfair advantage of other people”. Before that they were known in English as a haye or dogfish, which means sometime in the ~1400s enough English sailors started saying “don’t get in the water, it’s infested with those jerks”
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The etymology of the word shark is uncertain, the most likely etymology states that the original sense of the word was that of “predator, one who preys on others” from the Dutch schurk, meaning ‘villain, scoundrel’ (cf. card shark, loan shark, etc.), which was later applied to the fish due to its predatory behaviour.
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fun fact: in german der Schurke / die Schurkin are villains, while der Hai is the predatory fish.