In 2019, I was at Tate Modern, in splashing distance of Kara Walker’s fountain, as part of Resonance’s Art on Air series, with an hour-long live broadcast called Sharks: New Worlds, new words. You can listen to it here:

In all these suggestions, you can hear the sound – carcharias, denshoc, shirker. A nice crunching noise as the word, wherever it approaches from, sneaks up and devours the earlier names such as dogfish, lamia, requin, monster. It’s not exactly that the roots of the word ‘shark’ are unexplained. We have the opposite problem, that the etymology is swarming up from all over, in a sort of feeding frenzy, with all the sources landing, coalescing, on this sharp-toothed fish.