stylistic:tone, linguistic:paraphrasing
Naming and etymology

By the 17th century, Alces alces (moose, called "elk" in Europe) had long been extirpated from the British Isles, and the meaning of the word "elk" to English-speakers became rather vague, acquiring a meaning similar to "large deer". The name wapiti is from the Shawnee and Cree word waapiti (in Cree syllabics: ᐙᐱᑎ or ᐚᐱᑎ), meaning "white rump". There is a subspecies of wapiti in Mongolia called the Altai wapiti (Cervus canadensis sibiricus), also known as the Altai maral.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of the word "elk" is "of obscure history". In Classical Antiquity, the European Alces alces was known as Ancient Greek: ἄλκη, romanized: álkē and Latin: alces, words probably borrowed from a Germanic language or another language of northern Europe. By the 8th century, during the Early Middle Ages, the moose was known as Old English: elch, elh, eolh, derived from the Proto-Germanic: *elho-, *elhon- and possibly connected with the Old Norse: elgr. Later, the species became known in Middle English as elk, elcke, or elke, appearing in the Latinized form alke, with the spelling alce borrowed directly from Latin: alces. Noting that elk "is not the normal phonetic representative" of the Old English elch, the Oxford English Dictionary derives elk from Middle High German: elch, itself from Old High German: elaho.

The American Cervus canadensis was recognized as a relative of the red deer (Cervus elaphus) of Europe, and so Cervus canadensis were referred to as "red deer". Richard Hakluyt refers to North America as a "lande... full of many beastes, as redd dere" in his 1584 Discourse Concerning Western Planting. Similarly, John Smith 's 1616 A Description of New England referred to red deer. Sir William Talbot 's 1672 English translation of John Lederer 's Latin Discoveries likewise called the species "red deer", but noted in parentheses that they were "for their unusual largeness improperly termed Elks by ignorant people". Both Thomas Jefferson 's 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia and David Bailie Warden 's 1816 Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States used "red deer" to refer to Cervus canadensis.