{
 "schema": 1,
 "id": "cook-1769",
 "type": "story",
 "names": {
  "name": "How the word got in",
  "said": "Tahiti, 1769 — tatau becomes tattoo"
 },
 "region": [
  "oceania"
 ],
 "facets": {
  "era": "colonial"
 },
 "when": {
  "from": 1769,
  "to": 1774,
  "label": "Cook's first voyage, and Mai in London"
 },
 "text": {
  "what": "English had no single word for the practice until Cook's crew brought one back from Polynesia.",
  "story": "*Tatau* went into English as *tattoo* and swallowed everything else. Every tradition on this site is now described in English with a Samoan word, including the ones that had their own perfectly good nouns: *irezumi*, *godna*, *deq*, *kakiniq*, *sak*.\n\n*Inference —* that is not only a linguistic accident. It is why the English-language record treats Pacific tattooing as the default case and everything else as a variation on it, and it is visible in the coverage count on this site: the traditions with the most language editions written about them are mostly the ones the eighteenth-century voyages reached first."
 },
 "text_th": {
  "what": "ภาษาอังกฤษไม่มีคำเดียวสำหรับสิ่งนี้ จนลูกเรือของคุกนำคำกลับมาจากโพลินีเซีย"
 },
 "kin": [
  {
   "to": "tatau",
   "as": "The word.",
   "rel": "tradition"
  },
  {
   "to": "coverage",
   "as": "And what it did to the record.",
   "rel": "story"
  }
 ],
 "sources": [
  "s:wp-james-cook",
  "s:wp-pe-a",
  "s:wp-joseph-banks"
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "default": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-pe-a"
  },
  "fields": {
   "text_th": {
    "tier": "inference",
    "note": "written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated"
   }
  }
 },
 "confidence": "medium",
 "tags": [
  "colonial-record"
 ],
 "updated": "2026-09-19",
 "kin_in": [
  {
   "from": "tatau",
   "type": "tradition",
   "name": "Tatau",
   "as": "How the word got into English."
  },
  {
   "from": "coverage",
   "type": "story",
   "name": "Who gets written about",
   "as": "Why the English-language record is shaped this way."
  }
 ]
}