The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Fat Gunhilda

While Britain was developing the tank, Germany was building a gun. To be precise Germany was building an absolutely bloody enormous gun. It weighed 43 tons and could fire 1,800lb shells 2½ miles. Its official name was the L/12 42-cm Type M-Great Kurze Marine-Kanone, but that’s hardly the catchiest of names. So the designers at Krupp Armaments did a dastardly thing: they named it after their boss. The owner of the company was a fat woman called Bertha Krupp. So the engineers called their new gun Dick Bertha, which is German for Fat Bertha, or as it came to be known more alliteratively in English, Big Bertha.[12]

It’s odd to give a cannon a girl’s name. You hardly need to be a devoted disciple of Sigmund Freud to see a smidgen of phallic symbolism in a gun. However, history and Freud are at odds: for some reason guns are always girls.

During the Vietnam War, recruits into the US Marine Corps were required to give their rifles girls’ names, usually the name of their sweetheart at home; but the practice is much older than that. The standard issue flintlock musket of the British empire was called Brown Bess, and Rudyard Kipling joked that many men had been pierced to the heart by her charms. In Edinburgh castle there’s a huge medieval cannon known as Mons Meg, which was probably named after James III of Scotland’s wife, Margaret.

Why do guns have girls’ names? It’s a silly question because gun itself is a girl’s name. So far as anybody can tell (and theories vary), the very first gun in history was a cannon in Windsor Castle. A document from the early fourteenth century mentions Una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda, which means ‘a large cannon from Cornwall which is called Queen Gunhilda’.

Gunhilda is a girl’s name and the usual shortening of Gunhilda is Gunna. So far as etymology can tell, every gun in the English-speaking world is named after that one gunna in Windsor Castle: the Queen Gunhilda.

There actually was a Queen Gunhilda, as well. But what did she have to do with smartphones?