Whence
Sauna (the word)
Word

Where does Sauna (the word) come from?

The word sauna comes from Finland. It is an ancient Finnish word for both the hot bath and the room or building where it is taken, and English borrowed it in 1881. It has become the best-known Finnish word in many languages.

An ancient Finnish word

In Finnish, sauna means the traditional bath and the bathhouse itself. In some related Finnic languages, the matching words can simply mean a small cabin, such as a fisherman's hut. As for where the word itself came from, the linguist Petri Kallio has proposed, with some scholarly support, that it was borrowed long ago from an early Germanic word related to English stack, meaning a pile or heap: perhaps the pile of stones that formed an early sauna stove.

From Finland into English

English first recorded sauna in 1881, for a Finnish steam bath in which water is thrown on hot stones, and at first used it only about Finland. Finnish emigrants carried their sauna designs and customs abroad, and in 1938 the electric sauna stove was introduced in Vaasa, Finland. After the Second World War the sauna became very popular in Scandinavia and the German-speaking countries, and by 1959 English speakers used the word for saunas in homes and gyms outside Finland.

Why people think of Sweden or Russia

Finland's neighbours have their own hot baths. Swedes and Norwegians call theirs bastu or badstu, from badstuga, 'bath cabin', and the first saunas that colonists brought to what is now the United States were Swedish bastus in the colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River. Russians have the banya, which is quite similar to the Finnish sauna. But the world borrowed the Finnish word. Finland has at least 2 million saunas for about 5.5 million people, and UNESCO listed Finnish sauna culture as intangible heritage in 2020.

Sources: etymonline.com ↗ · merriam-webster.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org ↗ · ich.unesco.org ↗

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