Naming and Etymology
Since these canids are called dholes only in English, the etymology remains unclear, but it may have come from Kannada: tōḷa (‘wolf’). Some 19th-century authors connected this word with Turkish: deli ‘mad, crazy’, and erroneously compared the Turkish word with Old Saxon: dol and Dutch: dol (cf. also English: dull, German: toll), which are in fact from Proto-Germanic *dwalaz ‘foolish, stupid’.
Other names for the species include wild dogs, whistling dogs, chennai, red wolves (not to be confused with Canis rufus), red dogs and mountain wolves.
Read more about this topic: Dhole
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