A swan supplied the “Pooh” part of Winnie-the-Pooh’s name.
Christopher Robin Milne encountered a swan while on holiday and gave it the name Pooh. The name was later combined with “Winnie,” taken from Winnipeg, the black bear he visited at London Zoo.
The swan was not merely a naming detail: Pooh also appears as a character in When We Were Very Young, A. A. Milne’s 1924 collection of poems. That book preceded the first Winnie-the-Pooh story collection and helped establish Milne’s playful world of children, toys and animals.
Many people assume that Pooh is simply a nickname for the bear or a reference to honey, but the published origin connects it to the swan. Milne’s first Pooh book explains the name in a whimsical way, keeping the boundary between Christopher Robin’s real experiences and the fictional Hundred Acre Wood deliberately playful.