WotD: raccoon (Procyon lotor)

1. der Waschbär
2. de wasbeer
3. el mapache
4. l'ós rentador
5. le chaoui, le raton laveur
6. y racŵn
7. an racún
8. szop
9. 아메리카너구리
10. 浣熊 huànxióng
11. アライグマ (洗熊) araiguma

Notes: The breakdown according to etymology:

• Borrowings from American languages:
• Powhatan ärähkun: 0, 6, 7. (Clearly the the Celtic languages borrowed this through English.)
• Nahuatl mapachitli: 3.
• Choctaw shawi: 5 (Cajun only).
• Calques and native coinages:
  • "wash(ing) bear": 1, 2, 4, 10, 11. (The model is the obsolete Linnaean name Ursus lotor. Cf. Arm. ջրարջ "water-bear".)
  • "washing rat": 5 (Europe, Canada).
  • "American raccoon dog": 9.

The most interesting of the lot is Polish szop, which apparently represents a borrowing of obsolete German Schupp. This, in turn, is an abbreviation of Schuppenfell, where the element Fell ("pelt") has been added as an elucidating element to the Russian borrowing шуба šupa, of roughly the same meaning.

Got that?

It looks like a Russian word for "fur coat (of an animal)" was borrowed into German, compounded with a native German word for clarity, narrowed in meaning to raccoon pelts, metonymically applied to the animal they came from, shortened, and then borrowed into Polish. The Russian name, however, is енот, which represents a repurposing of a word for "genet" (a species of feliform carnivores related to the civet). So perhaps the first Schuppenfelle were genet hides, and only with the rise of the North American trade did they come to designate coonskins.