A New World cat with an Andean name
In English, a puma is the large tawny cat of the Americas, the species zoologists now list as Puma concolor. The same animal is also called a cougar, a mountain lion, and, in some districts, a panther. The noun can name the living beast or its pelt. British, Australian, and New Zealand usage leans toward puma more often than American English does, where cougar and mountain lion are the everyday labels. Those names do not mark different species. They are rival labels for one wide-ranging feline, found from northern forests to the Andes.
The origin of the word puma is not Germanic and not classical. English took the form ready-made from Spanish, and Spanish had already taken it from Quechua, the language of the Inca state and of millions of Andean speakers today.
From the Andes into Spanish
In Quechua the word puma already named the cat. Comparative work on the Quechuan family reconstructs an earlier Proto-Quechuan form of the same shape. English has no prefix or suffix to peel away here: the loan is a single root that meant the animal before it ever reached Europe.
Spanish colonists in Peru met both the cat and the name. Writers on the colonial Andes used puma for a creature that Spanish speakers sometimes likened to a lion, though it is not a lion and has no mane. Garcilaso de la Vega, early in the seventeenth century, is often named among the authors who put the Quechua term into European print. A later encyclopaedia account pointed to those colonial Spanish books as the channel that carried the name into European letters. From Spanish the form spread, with little change of spelling, into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and a long list of other languages. English is one borrower among many, not the inventor of the word.
Claims that the Quechua root originally meant something more abstract, such as power, are not what the standard etymological dictionaries record. Those sources treat puma as the animal name itself. Where a deeper gloss is unproven, it is better left aside.
Into English in the late eighteenth century
English naturalists of the 1770s needed a word for an American cat that had no Old World counterpart. Dictionaries do not agree on a single first-citation year. The Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest evidence in 1771, in the work of the naturalist Thomas Pennant. Merriam-Webster dates first known use to 1774. Other etymological handbooks print 1777. The spread is small. The English word is a late-eighteenth-century loan, not a medieval inheritance and not a nineteenth-century laboratory coinage.
What English borrowed was the Spanish spelling and, in outline, the Spanish sense. Two pronunciations settled in: one with a y-glide after the initial consonant, common in Britain, and one closer to the Spanish vowels. The noun is countable. The usual plural is pumas, though puma is also recorded.
Linnaeus had already given the species a Latin binomial in the same period, placing it among the cats as Felis concolor, a name that notes the adult’s unspotted coat. Later zoologists moved the species into its own genus, Puma. That scientific label is the Quechua word again, this time locked into nomenclature, even in regions where hikers say cougar.
Many names, one animal
English already had, or soon acquired, other names for the same cat, which is why puma never became the only standard word in North America. Cougar arrived in the same decade, through French, itself a reshaping of a Brazilian indigenous word that Portuguese naturalists had written down in the seventeenth century. Mountain lion and catamount are transparent English descriptions, built from habitat rather than from an Indigenous noun. Panther, an older European cat-name, was stretched to cover the American animal, especially in the eastern United States.
Colonists who already knew wolves, deer, and foxes had no inherited English word for this feline. They compared it to lions, tigers, and panthers, or they adopted names that other European languages had taken from Indigenous languages of the Americas. Puma is the Andean loan. Cougar is the Brazilian-French loan. Mountain lion is the settler description. The species is famous for how many names it carries; puma is the one that still shows its Andean source most clearly.
In much of Spanish-speaking America, puma remained the ordinary word. In the United States, mountain lion later became especially common in everyday speech, while scientific and international English kept using puma beside cougar. The split is regional habit, not a split in meaning.
The core sense has barely moved. English puma still denotes the cat, and by extension its fur. A recent slang use, modeled on the older slang of cougar, sometimes applies puma to a younger woman who dates younger men. That is analogical wordplay riding on another cat-name, not a change in the zoological term.
What the loan still shows
If you want a single dating to keep, keep the 1770s for English and the Andes for the root. The word did not grow inside English from pounce, from Latin, or from a hunter’s nickname. It is a Quechua name that Spanish transmitted, and that English then filed beside a cluster of rival labels. The scientific genus still carries that Andean form, a clearer fossil of the path than the more local American names.