Robins were redbreasts before English had a word for orange
The European robin is a small insect-eating songbird, 12.5 to 14 centimetres long, whose orange-red breast is shared by males and females alike. Britons simply say robin, but the bird was first called redbreast, because orange only became an English colour word in the sixteenth century.
Its range spans Europe east to western Siberia and south into North Africa. In the mild west and south robins stay put all year, while those in the colder north and east migrate. Adults have a grey-edged orange-red face and breast, brown upperparts and a pale belly. Young birds look quite different, speckled brown all over with no red at all, and first-winter birds resemble adults except for yellowish-brown tips on some wing feathers.
The colour dominates its names across Europe: Dutch roodborstje, French rouge-gorge, German Rotkehlchen, Italian pettirosso, Spanish petirrojo and more. In the fifteenth century, when giving familiar animals human names became fashionable, redbreast became robin redbreast and then just robin, Robin being a pet form of Robert. Older English also used ruddock and robinet, and late nineteenth-century American writers called it the English robin. The same name now covers unrelated red-breasted birds, including the American robin, a thrush, and the Australasian robins.
Linnaeus named it Motacilla rubecula in 1758, the species name meaning little red, from the Latin ruber. Georges Cuvier created the genus Erithacus in 1800, borrowing an Ancient Greek name for an unidentified bird now usually taken to be the robin. It was long filed with the thrushes but belongs to the Old World flycatchers. The Japanese and Ryukyu robins used to share its genus until genetic studies showed them closer to other Asian species, so they moved to Larvivora, leaving the European robin alone in Erithacus. Analyses in 2010 and 2023 placed it in an otherwise tropical African subfamily, where it is the sole European member and occupies a basal branch.
Variation across its huge range is modest, and subspecies mostly reflect resident island and mountain populations. The British and western European form wanders into neighbouring regions; birds of northwest Africa, Corsica and Sardinia are similar but shorter-winged; northeastern birds are large and pale; and distinct forms live in Crimea, the Caucasus and northern Iran.
Source: European robin
