SPELUNKING

[Q] From Austin: How did the word Spelunking come about? I know that it means exploring caves, but I have no idea how it came to be or why it means that.

[A] It’s American and — I suspect — a learned joke.

There are two words that refer to exploring caves. The older is speleology, with its derived speleological and speleologist. These have been around since the middle 1890s and were brought over directly from French, where pioneers such as the lawyer Edouard Martel had explored caves from the 1880s on; in 1895 he founded the Société de Spéléologie. French got the words from Latin spelaeum, which variously meant a cave, cavern, den, or grotto (it derives from Greek spelaion, a cave). These days speleology refers in particular to the scientific study of caves, as opposed to hobby or sport exploration, though that wasn’t necessarily true when it first appeared.

This public cave would hardly be a challenge for even the most inexperienced spelunker.

Your term, plus spelunker for a person who does it, came along in the early 1940s in the US as a term more specifically for somebody who explores caves as a hobby. This was presumably based by some learned person on an ancient and defunct English word spelunk for a cave, which is last recorded in 1563 (though it’s just possible he may have taken it from the related adjective speluncar, which had a brief flowering in the nineteenth century). The old English word had itself come from Greek and Latin through French, in this case from the closely related Latin spelunca that the Romans took over from the Greek spelynx.

Spelunk first turns up in print, so far as I know, in a tortuous bit of wordplay that began a news item in the Salisbury Times of Maryland dated October 1941: “Spelunkers spieled tales of spelunks today for the nation’s first conference on speology [sic].” But it was around in the spelunking community before then.

Within caving circles, I’m told, spelunker now means an untrained and unknowledgeable amateur explorer; the more experienced prefer to term themselves cavers, which is also the usual British term. Scientists and cavers who explore with serious purpose continue to call themselves speleologists.

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