Etymology
The etymological origin of the name Cherusci is not known with certainty. According to the dominant opinion in scholarship, the name may derive from the ancient Germanic word *herut (Modern English hart, i.e. 'deer'). The tribe may have been named after the deer because it had a totemistic significance in Germanic symbolism. A different hypothesis, proposed in the 19th century by Jacob Grimm and others, derives the name from *heru-, a word for 'sword' (cf. Gothic hairus, Old English heoru) Hans Kuhn has argued that the derivational suffix -sk-, involved in both explanations, is otherwise not common in Germanic. He suggested that the name may therefore be a compound of ultimately non-Germanic origin, connected to the hypothesized nordwestblock.
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