Cryptids, Kaiju, and Godzilla, Oh My!

In April, Merriam-Webster added the word “cryptid” to its dictionary. And in May, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” hits theaters. With those two events happening back-to-back, it seemed like a good time to talk about a few monster words and to answer an important question: Is Godzilla a cryptid?

Godzilla vs. Gojira

Let’s start with Godzilla. I’m sure you know who he is: that fictional, dinosaur-like monster who walks on two legs, destroys cities, and breathes not fire—but atomic radiation. He first appeared in the 1954 Japanese movie “Gojira.” In the movie, he’s awakened from a peaceful life beneath the sea when he’s dosed with the radiation from an atomic bomb. He destroys the city of Shinagawa and irradiates many of its citizens before finally being destroyed. 

Just nine years before this movie was made, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed, closing the final chapter of World War II. Godzilla thus serves as both a symbol of nuclear holocaust and a metaphor for the devastation these bombings caused.

By the way, you might have noticed I pronounced the name of the 1954 movie as “go-JHI-ra,” not “god-ZILL-uh.” That’s because “Godzilla” is an anglicized version of the Japanese word “Gojira.” And “Gojira,” in turn, is a combination of two other words: “gorira,” meaning “gorilla,” and “kujira,” meaning “whale.” Regular Grammar Girl listeners might recognize this as a portmanteau—words like “spork” and “smog” that combine two parts of others words to make something new.

Now, when I picture Godzilla, I don’t necessarily think, “Wow, he kind of looks like a gorilla and kind of like a whale!” But I can see where the filmmakers were coming from.

‘Kaiju’ Means ‘Strange Beast’

“Gojira” was one of the first examples of what’s called a tokusatsu kaiju movie. Let me break that down. 

“Tokusatsu” is a Japanese word meaning “special effects.” It tends to refer to live-action movies that were made in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. CGI hadn’t yet been invented back then, and special effects were pretty remedial. Think of men wearing monster suits, flying saucers being dangled on a string, and stop-motion monsters made of clay.

“Kaiju” is a Japanese word meaning “strange beast”; in other words, what English speakers would call a monster. Super-powerful kaiju are sometimes called “daikaiju.” The “dai-“ prefix refers to their great...

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