Hedgehogs – why can't they just share the hedge?
This was the joke that won Dan Antopolski the Funniest Joke of the Fringe award at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. [1]
Hedgehogs were not always called that. In old English, it was an igil, cognate with modern German Igel. But in the early part of the Middle English period this was displaced by yrichon, 'urchin', a word of French origin. This was in turn replaced in the 15th century by heyghoge and hedgehog it has been ever since.
But where did igil and urchin come from? Well Old French herichun is from Latin ericius and the latter is thought to derive from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *ghers-, 'bristly' or 'spiny', probably the origin also of horror, in the sense of your hair standing on end, bristling, you see.
At this point you may be guessing igil is from the same root, but you'd be wrong ; igil is from a different root *heg-, 'hedgehog'. The hedgehog had a PIE root all to itself, hogging it you might say!
This is also the source of Ancient Greek ekhinos, 'hedgehog' or 'sea urchin'. which of course is where we get echinoderm. It seems people have often seen a parallel between between the spiny land animal and the spiny sea creature, and at one time hedgehogs were sometimes called land urchins to distinguish them.
Modern Greek has a different word for hedgehog which I rather like: skandzóchiros, 'prickly pig', which seems a bit more descriptive than the English equivalent.
[1] BBC News. (2009, August 24). Hedgehog joke is Fringe funniest. bbc.co.uk