The word #raccoon was adopted into English from the native Powhatan term, as used in the Virginia Colony. It was recorded on Captain John Smith’s list of Powhatan words as aroughcun, and on that of William Strachey as arathkone.It has also been identified as a Proto-Algonquian root *ahrah-koon-em, meaning «[the] one who rubs, scrubs and scratches with its hands».
Similarly, Spanish colonists adopted the Spanish word mapache from the Nahuatl mapachitli of the Aztecs, meaning «[the] one who takes everything in its hands».In many languages, the raccoon is named for its characteristic dousing behavior in conjunction with that language’s term for bear, for example Waschbär in German, orsetto lavatore in Italian, mosómedve in Hungarian, 浣熊 in Chinese and araiguma (アライグマ) in Japanese. In French and European Portuguese, the washing behavior is combined with these languages’ term for rat, yielding, respectively, raton laveur and ratão-lavadeiro. The raccoon’s scientific name, Procyon lotor, is neo-Latin, meaning «dog-like washer», with lotor Latin for «washer» and Procyon Latinized Greek from προ-, «before, in place of, in exchange for» and κύων, «dog».
The colloquial abbreviation coon is used in words like coonskin for fur clothing and in phrases like old coon as a self-designation of trappers. In the 1830s, the U.S. Whig Party used the raccoon as an emblem, causing them to be pejoratively known as ‘coons’ by their political opponents, who saw them as too sympathetic to African-Americans. Soon after that it became an ethnic slur, especially in use between 1880 and 1920 (see coon song), and the term is still considered offensive.
In the first decades after its discovery by the members of the expedition of Christopher Columbus, who was the first person to leave a written record about the species, taxonomists thought the raccoon was related to many different species, including dogs, cats, badgers and particularly bears. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, placed the raccoon in the #genus #Ursus, first as Ursus cauda elongata («long-tailed bear») in the second edition of his Systema Naturae (1740), then as Ursus Lotor («washer bear») in the tenth edition (1758–59). In 1780, Gottlieb Conrad Christian Storr placed the raccoon in its own genus Procyon, which can be translated as either «before the dog» or «doglike». It is also possible that Storr had its nocturnal lifestyle in mind and chose the star #Procyon as eponym for the species.
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