What does the name 'orangutan' mean in Malay?

In Malay, the name “orangutan” means “forest person.”

The word is usually explained as a combination of orang, meaning “person” or “people,” and hutan, meaning “forest.” The phrase reflects the ape’s life in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, where orangutans spend most of their time in trees. “Forest person” is the standard English gloss, while “person of the forest” conveys the same meaning.

The name has an unusually complicated history. The first printed Western reference to the animal appeared in 1631 in a work by Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius. English later adopted several spellings, including orang-outang and orang-utan, before “orangutan” became standard. Some scholars argue that early European writers may have misunderstood how local terms were used, and that the phrase originally referred to forest-dwelling humans in some contexts.

The name is not derived from “orange,” despite the similar opening sound. It also does not literally mean “red ape”; that phrase describes the animal’s appearance, not the word’s Malay etymology. Orangutans are great apes, not monkeys, and are among the most tree-dwelling of the great apes.