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"Mongita" is a misspelling according to the DLE; the standard spelling is "monjita". Literally, the word means "little nun", but is the common name for flycatchers of the genus Xolmis. https://dle.rae.es/?formList=form&w=monjita# https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xolmis_rubetra

Unfortunately every time I see the misspelling in this thread I involuntarily cringe. I suppose "MongoDB" is named after a slur used to insult people with Down syndrome, so maybe calling this project the Spanish equivalent of "Magolia", "Mamalian", or "Meercat" is a clever reversal of the insult into a form of self-deprecation on the part of the author, who is wittily feigning illiteracy? Or perhaps it is intended to ridicule the speling of Spainards and other speekers of Spansh? Or programmers who decided to yoke their applications to fake open source?

Even if correctly spelled, perhaps the name would be more appropriate to a debugging tool than to a hash table implementation.



FYI the name MongoDB comes from "humongous". Thanks for the wiki links, though.


You're welcome! I hope the information is useful in helping scottrogowski carefully consider how many people he wants to insult. However, the DLE is not a Wiki.


It seems more likely to me that it's not a misspelling of "monjita" but rather just a naive application of the Spanish -ito/-ita diminutive suffix to "Mongo".


These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

While your guess about the thought processes of the originator may well be correct, it is still the case that the result, "Mongita", is ① unambiguously Spanish and ② unambiguously pronounced in Spanish as [monxita], which is a real Spanish word, the diminutive of the common word monja, meaning "nun". But [monxita] is spelled "monjita".

The result is that what may well have been an incorrect application of the diminutive suffix (the correct result would be "Monguito") produced a misspelling of "monjita". It's just as clearly misspelled Spanish as "Ke keres aser?" or "yerba maté", if not more so. So you can expect most Spanish speakers to read it as ridiculing the literacy of an unspecified person—more so if they also know English, given that "mongo" has been an English word used for ridiculing someone's intelligence for many generations.


To be fair, one suggested etymology I've seen for for 'mongo' is a simplification of 'humongous'.

Whether you believe this claim or not, it's entirely down to whether you want to take a charitable or negative guess at the original intention.


Anyone who reads Spanish fluently will react to the misspelling "Mongita"—whether with distaste, amusement, pity, or defensiveness—long before they have time to think through the possible motivations of the MongoDB developers.




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