The Purim Grogger’s Name Comes from Spain

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.

Groggers belong to the rattle category of the krotalon/crotalus group, and anyone familiar with them who has had the pleasure of encountering a rattlesnake, Crotalus cerastes, knows how much its warning signal resembles a grogger’s clackety whir. Shall we then call groggers “Purim rattles?” That’s better than “Purim noisemakers” but still not exact enough, there being many different types of rattles, too. A rattlesnake’s works by vibrations of the hollow scales in its tail; a baby’s by shaking a sphere filled with pellets. In the traditional grogger, on the other hand, a small wooden board whirled by a handle passes over the teeth of a cogwheel, thus producing a rapid succession of grating clicks. (In some varieties of the cog rattle, or ratchet, as it is also known in English, it is the cogwheel that is turned, often by means of a crank.)