The Purim Grogger’s Name Comes from Spain

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It’s still not too late to order your Purim noisemakers. That’s how the “groggers” that drown out the name of Haman during the Megillah reading are generally known in English, and they range on Judaica sites from simple wooden ones to sterling silver. Yet “noisemaker” is a term that can denote anything from a clarinet to a kettledrum and from a kazoo to a vuvuzela. Doesn’t English have anything more specific?

It does. But let’s first start with the Yiddish word grager itself. Since nobody has managed to connect it with any of the languages from which Yiddish has derived its vocabulary, its origins are presumed to be indigenous and to lie in an onomatopoeic imitation of the grogger’s sound. Although “grogger” has essentially the same first syllable as Greek krotalon and Latin crotalus (“g” and “k” or hard “c” frequently interchange in the history of languages), two words that designated a variety of ancient percussion instruments like clappers, castanets, and rattles and that are still in use in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, there’s no reason to think it descends from them.