Ironically enough sea sharks take their name from land sharks, rather than the other way around. The German Schurke, “a greedy parasite,” gives us the word shark and German sailors applied this term to the sea creature, no doubt having the greedy land shark in mind when they did so. British sailors brought the word home in about 1569, the same year that English mariner John Hawkins exhibited a huge shark in London. Shark was quickly adopted to describe both the killer fish and his human counterpart.