etymology - Thrown by 'broncho.' Or is it 'bronco'? Or 'bronc'?


Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, first edition (1908) has this entry for broncho:



Broncho (brŏn´kō), n. {Sp. bronco rough, wild.} A native or a Mexican horse of small size. {Western U.S.}



Four entries later, the same dictionary has this item:



Bronco n. Same as BRONCHO.



From this treatment it appears that the dictionary in 1908 regarded broncho as the primary English spelling and bronco as a variant. (Indeed, Webster's Academic Dictionary [1895] has the identical entry for broncho, but no mention of bronco at all.)


A century later, Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) has the following entry for bronco:



bronco also broncho n, pl broncos also bronchos {MexSp, fr. Sp, lit., rough, wild} (1850) : BRONC



and this entry for bronc:



bronc n {short for bronco} (1893) : an unbroken or imperfectly broken range horse of western No. America; broadly : MUSTANG



I have three questions:





  1. Is bronc now the primary term and spelling in English for bronc/bronco/broncho?




  2. When and under what circumstances did each of these three terms enter English?




  3. How did the Spanish word bronco come to acquire the h in the spelling broncho in English (even though the word, according to Merriam-Webster, retained the hard-k sound of bronco)?





The information that I collected on questions 1, 2, and 3 during the course of my own research, though somewhat incomplete in every case, is detailed and interesting enough to encourage me to submit it as a partial answer, which I will do shortly.



Here is what the Ngram chart for bronc (green line), bronco (blue line), and broncho (red line) for the years 1820–2005 looks like:



Unfortunately, the Ngram chart results are badly skewed by many false positives for broncho (and bronc), attributable to the Ngram tool's tendency to treat hyphens as letter spaces, which results in many matches for broncho that turn out to be references to (for example) broncho-pneumonia.




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