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Oct. 14, 2026 (Wed.)

A Word at a TimeOct. 14, 2026

Winnie-the-Pooh at 100: "Pooh" Started Out as a Scoff

It was a name that still worked when the swan ignored you. A boy gave it to a swan, and his teddy bear inherited it.

In Three Lines

"Winnie-the-Pooh" was first published in London 100 years ago today.
"Pooh!" was how English speakers scoffed. A. A. Milne's young son gave the sound to a swan he fed every morning.
It has nothing to do with "poo." That meaning turned up about a generation after the book.

A hundred years ago today, on Oct. 14, 1926, the London publisher Methuen brought out "Winnie-the-Pooh," A. A. Milne's stories about his only son, Christopher Robin, and the boy's teddy bear. It sold 150,000 copies in the 11 weeks before the year was out.

It is easy to hear the name as pure nursery noise. "Pooh" is the sound your lips make when you round them and let out a breath, and a sound that soft hardly seems to need a meaning.

But to an English speaker of Milne's day, "pooh!" meant something. It was the noise you made to brush a thing aside, a puff of air that said, more or less, "So what?" One of the best-loved names in children's books is half a scoff.

How it got there will be familiar to anyone who has waved at a friend across the street and watched the friend walk on without noticing. You don't leave your hand hanging in the air. You carry it up to your hair and smooth it back, as if that had been the plan all along.

Winnie was a Canadian bear, and a female one

The first half of the name comes with a well-known story. On Aug. 24, 1914, Lt. Harry Colebourn, a veterinarian in the Canadian Army, was riding a train to a training camp in Quebec, on his way to the First World War. When the train stopped at White River, Ontario, a trapper on the platform was selling an orphaned black bear cub, and Colebourn paid $20 for her. He named her after Winnipeg, the city he called home. Winnie, for short.

The cub became the regiment's mascot and crossed the Atlantic with it. Before Colebourn left for the front in France, he placed Winnie in the care of the London Zoo on Dec. 9, 1914, and after the war he donated her outright. The zoo's own records describe her as tame enough to be stroked and played with. Milne's son was even allowed into her enclosure.

Christopher Robin already had a bear of his own. His teddy, bought at Harrods by his mother for his first birthday in 1921, was originally called Edward. Once the boy fell for the bear at the zoo, the teddy took her name. That is why a male bear in the books carries a girl's name, a puzzle Milne raised himself on the first page by asking the reader's question before the reader could.

Many tellings stop there, and it makes a tidy story. NPR marked the centenary this month with the tale of the real Winnie. But Winnie is only half the name.

Pooh was a swan

The other half came from somewhere else entirely. In 1924, two years before the stories, Milne published "When We Were Very Young," a book of verse for his son. Its preface mentions a swan that Christopher Robin fed every morning and called Pooh.

Milne thought it a very fine name for a swan, and he said why. Call a swan and it often won't come, "which is a thing swans are good at," as he put it. When one ignores you, you can pretend you were never calling it at all; you were only saying "Pooh!" to show how little you cared.

It is a cleverer name than it looks. Calling anything by name carries a small risk: if it doesn't come, you are left standing there. "Pooh" removes the risk. If the swan paddles over, you called its name; if it doesn't, you scoffed. Either way the boy never looks foolish, and the wave turns into a hair-smoothing gesture halfway through.

If the swan comes, it's a name. If it doesn't, it's a scoff.

In the introduction to "Winnie-the-Pooh," Milne brought the swan back. When they said goodbye to it, he wrote, they took the name with them, since the swan no longer seemed to need it. So when Edward Bear wanted an exciting name of his own, Christopher Robin answered at once: Winnie-the-Pooh. One name now held a zoo bear and a swan, with a "the" in the middle of the sort that attaches a title, as in Alexander the Great.

The scoff goes back to "Hamlet"

So how long had "pooh" been a scoff? The Oxford English Dictionary, which records when English words first appear, describes "pooh" as a vocal gesture for puffing something away. Its earliest recorded use is in "Hamlet," written around 1600.

In the first act, Polonius, the king's chief counselor, questions his daughter Ophelia about Prince Hamlet. When she says the prince has lately offered her many signs of affection, her father cuts her off: "Affection! pooh! you speak like a green girl." He dismisses her feelings in a single breath. Some modern editions, including the Folger Shakespeare Library's, print the word as "puh," but the sound is the same.

By the 1820s the scoff had doubled into a verb, "pooh-pooh," meaning to wave something away, and newspapers still use it. In the early 1860s the German-born Oxford philologist Max Müller used it to name a theory he did not accept, the idea that human speech began with cries like "ouch." He called it the "pooh-pooh theory."

Some 60 years after Müller, when Christopher Robin chose "Pooh!" for a swan, he was reaching for a sound English speakers had been scoffing with for more than 300 years.

The bathroom meaning came a generation later

If the name makes you think of something else, you have company. Mental Floss once devoted a piece to why the bear is called Pooh, noting that most children, and plenty of grown-ups, have a different idea of what a pooh is.

That meaning did not exist when Milne wrote. Merriam-Webster dates "poo" in the sense of excrement to around 1960, and the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it in the 1950s. Children in 1926 heard a scoff; the bathroom joke arrived with their own children.

About 1960

First known use of "poo" for excrement, according to Merriam-Webster, a generation after "Winnie-the-Pooh"

What other languages did with the scoff

Most of the joke was lost at the border. Dmitry Sichinava, a Russian linguist who collects editions of the book, estimates that it exists in at least 60 languages. Translators had to decide what to do with the name, because the laugh in "Pooh" is audible only to people who already hear English.

Russia shows the problem. When two chapters ran in the children's magazine Murzilka in 1939, the hero was "Bear Winnie-Pu," the sound carried over with nothing attached. In Boris Zakhoder's translation, published as a book in 1960, he became Vinni-Pukh. In Russian, pukh is down, the soft under-feathers of a bird.

Poland went the same way. In 1938 the translator Irena Tuwim renamed him Kubuś Puchatek, and the puch in Puchatek is Polish for fluff. Carried into Slavic languages, the scoff came out as down.

East Asia kept only one half of the name, Winnie or Pooh. Momoko Ishii, whose 1940 translation was Japan's first, kept Pooh. Chinese readers mostly know the bear as Xiaoxiong Weini, "little bear Winnie." Korea calls him Gomdori Pu, pairing the sound with an affectionate word for a bear, and so took the sound without the scoff.

Christopher Robin gave the swan a name that let him off the hook if it didn't come. The bear that inherited the name came every time children called, for a hundred years. No one ever had to smooth back their hair. They could just keep waving.

Sources

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