Loup-Garou vs Rougarou vs Werewolf: What Is the Difference?

Short version: they're three names for nearly the same idea, in three accents. Werewolf is the English word. Loup-garou is the French word. Rougarou is how south Louisiana says loup-garou. The words are close cousins, and the legends behind them are where it gets interesting.

Werewolf: the English word

Werewolf comes from Old English: wer meant "man" and wulf meant "wolf," so a werewolf is literally a man-wolf. The word wer dropped out of everyday English long ago and hangs on today almost only inside this one word. If you want the fancier, scholarly cousin, lycanthrope comes from Greek and means "wolf-person."

Loup-garou: the French word

Loup is French for wolf. Garou comes from an Old French word for werewolf, which in turn goes back to a Frankish word meaning "man-wolf." Which means loup-garou says "wolf" twice: it's a wolf werewolf. Linguists have a name for that kind of doubling, a pleonasm, and the French didn't mind. English speakers started borrowing loup-garou around 1580.

French also does something English doesn't. It treats garou like our prefix were-, so the language has room for a chien-garou (a were-dog) or a chat-garou (a were-cat).

Rougarou: the Louisiana word

Take loup-garou across the Atlantic and let Cajun and Creole speakers wear it smooth over a few generations, and you get rougarou, pronounced ROO-guh-roo. In south Louisiana, people use both words, and you'll also see it spelled roux-ga-roux or rugaru. If you want the whole legend, start with What Is the Rougarou?

So are they the same creature?

Here's the honest answer: folklorists don't fully agree.

The rougarou clearly descends from the French loup-garou. What people argue about is how closely the two still resemble each other. Some sources treat the Louisiana creature as the French one in a new home. Others, including the scholar Nathan Rabalais in his book on Louisiana folklore figures, say the medieval French loup-garou looked very little like the rougarou by the time it settled in the bayou.

The biggest difference is how you become one. In the old French and Louisiana tellings, there's no bite and no full moon. The rougarou is a punishment, tied to breaking Lent seven years in a row, with curses that last a set number of days or can be passed to someone else. The modern rulebook most of us know (full moon, silver bullet, one bite and you're done) owes a lot to twentieth-century movies, not to old oral tradition.

Quick cheat sheet

• Werewolf: the English word, Old English for "man-wolf."
• Loup-garou: the French word, literally "wolf werewolf."
• Rougarou: the Louisiana form of loup-garou, and a legend still told as a living one.
• Lycanthrope: the scholarly word, from Greek for "wolf-person."

One caution before you borrow any of them for your own story: in Louisiana the rougarou isn't just a monster for the shelf. Plenty of people grew up with it, and it deserves to be treated as theirs.

If you like your werewolves with a case to solve, Remy's first story, The First Change, is free when you join the list.

Keep reading

• Werewolf Legends and Lore: Where the Wolf-Men Came From, the big-picture guide
• What Is the Rougarou? The Werewolf Legend of Louisiana

Where I got this

• Werewolf Words, Wordnik, for the word histories, the pleonasm, and the French were- use of garou
• Loup-garou, Merriam-Webster, for the Old French roots and first known English use
• Rougarou: The Swamp Werewolf, Terrebonne Parish Library, for the scholarly disagreement over how alike the French and Louisiana creatures are
• Nathan J. Rabalais, Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana (2021)