shark: [16] The origins of the word shark are obscure. It appears to have been introduced to English in the late 1560s by members of Sir John Hawkins’ expedition (a ballad of 1569 recorded ‘There is no proper name for [the fish] that I know, but that certain men of Captain Hawkins’s doth call it a shark’), but it is not known where they got it from. A resemblance to Austrian dialect schirk ‘sturgeon’ has been noted. Also not clear is whether shark ‘swindler’ (first recorded in the 18th century) is the same word; an alternative possibility is that it came from German schurke ‘scoundrel’. [shark etymology, shark origin, 英语词源]