guan

n.
Any of several large game birds of the family Cracidae, native to the jungles of tropical America and related to and resembling the curassows.

[American Spanish, of South American Indian origin.]

from Kuna
This word originated in Panama

Guans are not the stuff of epics. There is no Guan with the Wind, at least in English. But bird watchers come from far away to add the colorful Central American birds to their list. And they can add a lot, because there are more than fifty different species of guan. There is the Crested Guan (Penelope purpurascens), noted for the little crest on its head, along with its red throat and the purple around its eyes. There is the Black Guan (Chamaepetes unicolor), in your basic black, which is also the color of the Crested Guan's body. And then there are, among others, the Red-faced Guan, Rusty-margined Guan, Band-tailed Guan, Bearded Guan, Blue-throated Piping-Guan, White-winged Guan, Dusky-legged Guan, Wattled Guan, Sickle-winged Guan, Horned Guan, Andean Guan, Highland Guan--you get the picture.

All guans are turkey-like creatures who have been a useful link in the food chain of the human residents of Central America. They were noted in the English language as early as 1743, by George Edwards in his Natural History of Uncommon Birds: "The Quan or Guan, so called in the West Indies, ... is a little bigger than a common Hen."

The Indians that named them were the Kuna of Panama and Colombia. There are about seven hundred speakers of Kuna in each country. Kuna apparently belongs to the Chibchan family of two dozen languages in Central America. In Panama, the Kuna have been granted an autonomous reserve, the San Blas Islands, where they can follow their traditional way of life and display it for tourists. The men fish, the women sew, and you can spend the night on Dolphin Island "in traditional Kuna-style huts with cozy beds and shared baths" and visit the Kuna Museum on the neighboring island of Ailigandi the next day. The main stronghold of the Kuna language, however, is on the mainland to the south in the villages of Paya and Pucuro. No other words of Kuna have migrated to English.

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Chinese family of painters. Based in Guangzhou (Canton) in the late 18th century and the 19th, they are best known for their production of Western-style paintings created for the export market. (1) Guan Zuolin, known by his Western name, Spoilum, was the first identifiable artist of the Cantonese export school (see also CHINA,

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: any of several large turkey-like game birds of the family Cracidae; native to jungles of tropical America; resembling the curassows and valued as food

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