Ginger

The word came from India, over about two thousand years

Ginger is an old trade word. English has it from Old English gingifer, by way of medieval Latin gingiber, from Greek zingiberis, from a Prakrit form, and ultimately from Sanskrit śṛṅgavera. The Sanskrit is traditionally analysed as śṛṅga, "horn", plus vera, "body" — "horn-shaped" — a description of the knobbly rhizome rather than of the taste. The same reading appears in the pharmaceutical-history literature.

That route is the spice route. Ginger was being moved west long before it was being grown west, and the word travelled with the root. It is why the modern English word looks nothing like a Germanic word and everything like a loan.

Why a spice became a colour, and then a dog's name

In English, ginger stopped being only a noun a long time ago. It is the ordinary word for red-gold hair, and from there it attached itself to anything with that colour — which is how it became a dog name. A ginger dog is a red dog.

The name is therefore descriptive, and it is chosen for a coat. In dogs the colour is usually called red or gold rather than ginger. The classic pairings are the Irish Setter, the red Golden Retriever, the Dachshund, the Norfolk and Norwich terriers and most of the spaniels. If your dog is liver-and-white or black, the name will read as either a joke or simply as a word you liked — both are fine, but they are different names.

One thing to flag: Ginger is also the name of the chestnut mare in Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. It is a strong association for anyone who read the book as a child, and it belongs to a horse.

The genetics behind a ginger coat

There is a real mechanism behind the colour, and it is a pleasing one. In dogs, red and yellow coats come from the MC1R gene — the same gene that, in humans, is the main determinant of red hair. The dog version is called the E locus: a dog that inherits two copies of the recessive e allele produces phaeomelanin instead of eumelanin, and the coat comes out yellow to red. The UC Davis Veterinary Genetics Laboratory publishes the test.

The parallel with human red hair is not exact — different variants, different inheritance — but it is the same gene doing a similar job, which is why a ginger dog and a ginger person share a colour.

One practical consequence: a recessive red dog cannot have black, liver, blue or isabella anywhere in its coat, because it cannot make eumelanin there at all. A black mask on a red dog is genetically impossible. The nose and eye rims can still be black, though, because that pigment is produced under different rules — so a red dog with a black nose is entirely normal and not a contradiction.

Ginger in a house with more than one dog

Ginger is two syllables with the stress on the first: JIN-jer. It is easy to say and it carries reasonably, though the ending is a schwa rather than a full vowel, so it does not stretch the way a name ending in -o or -ee does.

The bigger issue is collision. Ginger sits in a crowded neighbourhood — Ginny, Jinx, Gemma — and if you already have a dog whose name starts with a j sound or ends in -er, you are setting up a discrimination problem. Dogs tell names apart mainly by the stressed vowel and the overall shape, and "Ginger" and "Ginny" share both.

As a human name, Ginger is mid-century — Ginger Rogers is the bearer most people can name — and it is far more common on pets than on people now. That is not a drawback. It means the name arrives with no expectation attached beyond the colour, which for a dog name is close to ideal.

See also: Rusty · Scarlet · Cinnamon · Maple · Clover

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