Papillon

Butterfly, and also a breed

The word is ordinary French. Papillon means butterfly, and it is the same word in the sense of a moth, a parking ticket and a bow tie. As a dog name it arrives with a specific problem attached: Papillon is also the name of a breed, and a distinctive one.

The Papillon — once called the Continental Toy Spaniel — is a small spaniel type with erect ears fringed with long hair. The breed standard recognises two varieties, distinguished only by ear carriage: the Papillon, whose ears stand up, and the Phalène, whose ears hang down. Phalène is French for moth, which is the joke — an upright-eared dog is a butterfly, a drop-eared one is a moth.

The ears are the whole story

The breed was developed in France and is usually described as a Renaissance creation, favoured by European nobility and painted repeatedly — small spaniels with butterfly ears appear in a great deal of European portraiture from the sixteenth century onward, which is how we know roughly how old the type is.

That history is worth a sentence because it explains the name. Nobody sat down and invented "Papillon" for a modern breed. The dogs were already being painted with those ears, and the name is simply a description of what everyone could see.

The other Papillon

If you mention the name to someone over fifty, there is a good chance they will think of a book rather than a dog. Papillon is the title of Henri Charrière's memoir, published in 1969, which describes his imprisonment in the French penal colony in Guiana and a series of escapes from it. Charrière's own nickname was Papillon, for a butterfly tattoo. The book was enormously successful, and the 1973 film with Steve McQueen fixed the association for a generation.

How much of the book is true has been argued about since publication, including by French authorities at the time. That is not really the point for a dog name. The point is that the word carries a second meaning in English that it does not carry in French, and you will meet it.

Saying it, and shortening it

In French it is pah-pee-YON, with a nasal vowel at the end and the stress on the last syllable. In English it is usually PAP-ih-lon, with the stress at the front and the nasal flattened. Our own listing records the French-style pronunciation, which is the more elegant of the two and the one that will make people ask you to repeat it.

Three syllables is long for recall, and there is no natural shortening — Pap is not a word anyone wants to shout. That is the real obstacle to this name. If you want it, decide on the short form first: Papi, Pappy, or simply Papillon used in full with the stress pushed to the front. Whichever you pick, it has to be the thing you say every time, because this is a name a dog will need help learning.

The reward is that it is beautiful to say and means something exact. Papillon is one of the very few names where the word, the animal and the meaning all point at the same thing.

See also: Bijou · Fleur · Fifi · Chanel · Paloma

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