The Meaning of Endling

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. One of the most powerful and poignant words that I’ve ever come across is one that you won’t find in standard dictionaries, not yet at least, but I’m betting it’s going to end up in some of them eventually. And that word is endling, E-N-D-L-I-N-G. And it means the last surviving individual of a species or animal or plant.

And it’s a word with a great story behind it. Back in the mid-1990s, a physician named Robert Webster was working in a Georgia convalescent center, and he found himself talking with a patient who mentioned that she was the last surviving member of her family. Well, he thought about this and the fact that in English we really lack a word for being at the end of your family line.

So Dr. Webster and a colleague decided to come up with a word for that, and they thought about last a line, like last of the line, or ender, and a few others, but eventually they settled on the word endling, E-N-D-L-I-N-G. He liked this word so much that he actually called the editors of Merriam-Webster to say, hey, we’ve come up with this word that English needs, and you should include it in the dictionary.

But Grant, as you can imagine, he was turned down.

Right, because it takes more than that phone call.

Right. But in 1996, Webster and his colleague published a letter about this word in the journal Nature, and they expanded on the idea. They wrote, we need a word to designate the last person, animal, or other species in his, her, or its lineage. And readers were intrigued, and they wrote in with other suggestions, like ender or terminarch.

And some of them wrote in to say that we already have the word relict that scientists use, but usually that refers to an entire population of a species, not one individual. But a few years later, a curator at the National Museum of Australia in Sydney was working on an exhibit about the thylacine. Now that’s an extinct marsupial that’s also known as the Tasmanian tiger, and that’s spelled T-H-Y-L-A-C-I-N-E.

It’s pronounced thylacine or thylacine. And it’s this striking looking animal. You can see pictures of it online. It sort of looks like a dog with tiger stripes. And the last known thylacine died in captivity in 1936. And as it happened, that museum curator remembered the exchange in Nature magazine, and in the exhibit, he included the word endling.

And the exhibit and the word caught the imagination of artists and writers. After that, there was an Australian choreographer who wrote a ballet called Endling, and then composer Andrew Schultz wrote an orchestral composition called Endling Opus 72 for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. And he said, this piece flows from a feeling of immense regret and sorrow about all that has been lost from the face of the earth.

And science fiction writers ended up picking up on the idea. And more recently, historian Dolly Jorgensen has written about the power and attraction of that word endling. And you’ll appreciate this. She talks about the attractiveness of the Tolkien-esque suffix and the way it evokes something that’s young and vulnerable, like foundling or duckling.

And in her wonderful book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, Oregon writer Elena Passarello writes of the word endling, the little sound of it jingles like a newborn rattle, which makes it doubly sad.

Oh, how lovely.

Isn’t that something?

And what I think is really interesting is that artists and writers have been picking up on this word, and it’s starting to seep into the larger culture.

But it never did come to mean exactly what Dr. Webster had intended it to mean early on, which was the last surviving person.

But there’s something, I think, about the word endling that is really powerful.

It defines an individual.

It gives an individuality to that last member of a species.

I remember when I was a kid and went to the Smithsonian Institution, and there was a display about Martha, the last passenger pigeon.

And I was kind of rattled to see that, but giving that pigeon a name really made a difference, I think.

Yeah, and I’m thinking about Ishii, the Native American who was at the University of California, Berkeley, for a long time, showing people how he made arrows, but he was the last of his people.

He was the endling.

He was the endling, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I like this word, and I bet it’s going to end up in dictionaries.

You think it has a chance?

Yeah, it does, particularly showing up in all those different works from all those different people, and not as an orchestrated campaign, no pun intended, but it’s the orchestrated campaigns that tend to fail.

But when it naturally propagates, those are the ones that succeed, and has a reason to succeed.

Plus, it does seem perfectly coined, doesn’t it?

I think so.

And the Tolkien-esque part of it, I get.

There was intlings, the children of the ints.

Right, right.

And then also from the Star Wars universe, there’s the younglings, which are the young Jedi.

The young Jedi are called the younglings.

There you go.

Well, we’ll have to watch and wait.

I know there’s words that you’ve encountered in your reading, something that you came across, and you thought, well, I think the wider world needs to know this word.

I wonder how I can get that out there.

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