Etymologists are not entomologists. I know that should go without saying, but if you want some clear evidence of this, then just take a look at how badly Samuel Johnson fucked everything up when tasked with documenting caterpillars.
(I was reading about caterpillars recently, which made me think about etymology. That's not just because it sounds a bit like entomology, although that did play a big role. It's more because absolutely bloody everything makes me think about etymology, and I can't get more than three pages through anything without needing to run off and consult the OED about where a particular word came from.)
Caterpillars don't know what they really are, where they really came from, what they are going to evolve into, or what they even are supposed to look like, and neither does the word used to describe them.
Once upon a time, in the 15th century, caterpillars were known in English as catyrpels. Prior to that, what we call caterpillars were known in Old English and up to the 14th century as malshaves, brukes, erukes, mallyshags, hocks, and finally from mid 1400s as numerous variations on the word caterpillar
The earliest citation in the OED is from around 1440 from Promptorium Pavulorum which describes a Catyrpel a "wyrm among frute" (I'm going to pin the word "wyrm" and come back to it later for more study).
By 1530 the spelling had changed to "catyrpyllar", as noted in John Palsgrave's Leclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse. Catyrpyllars were still defined as a "worme" (whose spelling had also apparently also changed), but Palsgrave indicated that it could have been taken from "chatte pellevse".
The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (3rd ed) retools chatte pelleves as chatepelose and claims that caterpillars are "probably an alteration" of an Old French word that literally means "hairy cat".
Chat's are indeed French cats, (although modern usage of the word chatte refers to something a lot more vulgar (but not necessarily as hairy (i'll show myself out)).
In italian, pelose is the feminine plural form of peloso, which means hairy, is used as a nickname for a bearded man, and is where the surname Pelosi is derived from.
So caterpillars started out as hairy cats, but It took a few hundred years for the vowels to settle, and as the caterpillar changed form, so did the assumed meaning of the word.
in 1535 the coverdale bible indicate the spelling had been tweaked slightly in psalm 78:
"He gaue their frutes vnto the catirpiller."
by 1597, Shakespeare showed in Richard II that the spelling was somewhat locked down "caterpiller"
which was backed up in 1593 by Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence and the 1611 King James Bible "The canker worme, and the caterpiller"
R Lovell called them "Catorpillers" in 1661,
1664's Kalendarium Hortense 60 in Sylva by J Evelyn indicated that they were also known as caterpillars, and this is the spelling that Samuel Johnson decided should go in his 1755 dictionary definition of the word caterpillar. Johnson acknowledges the "chatte peluse" theory but also posits that "It seems easily deducible from cates, food, and piller, fr. to rob; the animal that eats up the fruits of the earth."
Cates was a middle English word taken from the older acate, which refers to a purchase, and turned into the modern French achater which means to buy.
Samuel Johnson did not like caterpillars, and tried to propose in his dictionary that they weren't really just hairy little cat friends, and that they were instead merely thieves. Literally pillagers of valuable food that sneak into people's gardens to deprive them of the fruits of their own labour.
by 1773 he updated the definition to note that the word caterpillar could also refer to "anything voracious and useless", However, for some reason he chose to spell it as caterpillars, even though both Peacham and Bacon (obviously?) spelled it the same way Shakespeare did: Caterpiller. Johnson could easily have reinforced his own hateful anti-caterpillar narrative if he had called them pillers, because pillars are something entirely different. Pillar comes from the latin pila which means pillar. Not really all that complicated.
And then to confuse matters further, across the channel in France, caterpillars are known as chenille, which is derived from latin words that mean "little dog".
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