فرس النهر بين العنب والبطيخة

What does “faras an-nahr” mean in Arabic?

فرس النهر (faras an-nahr) is Arabic for hippopotamus, built from فرس (horse) + النهر (the river). What makes it memorable is that it arrives at the same image as the Greek: ἱπποπόταμος (hippopotamos) means “river horse” too. Arabic speakers and ancient Greeks both looked at this massive animal wading through African rivers and reached for exactly the same two words.

In the clip, a man works through a taste test — first a small grape, then a medium fruit, then a full-size watermelon — and the hippo’s reaction to each round earns it the affectionate sign-off فرس النهر الشاطر (“the clever river horse”). The compound is standard across all Arabic dialects: there is no colloquial shortening in common use, so the three-word name is what you will always hear. Learning it also gives you فرس (horse) and نهر (river) as building-block vocabulary, since both words appear widely on their own.