Yoga postures carry names drawn from animals, legendary figures, tools and geometric forms. The naming conventions are informative about where the repertoire came from and when.
Animal names describe a shape, not a behaviour
A large group of names refers to creatures, and the reference is generally to the outline the body makes rather than to anything the animal does.
This makes them effective teaching devices, since a name that evokes a shape lets a student check their own position against an image without a mirror.
The same principle appears in other movement traditions, where animal names are used for stances and forms in martial and dance practices worldwide.
Sage names attach a posture to a story
Another group is named for figures from legend and epic, and these names carry a narrative rather than a shape.
Teaching such a posture traditionally involves telling the story, which places the physical instruction inside a body of literature the student is expected to know.
Where classes are taught without the narrative material, these names become arbitrary labels, which is one reason they are frequently mispronounced or dropped.
The repertoire grew substantially in the modern period
Early texts describe a modest number of postures, most of them seated, and the very large repertoires familiar today are considerably later.
Historians have traced how physical culture, gymnastics and regional wrestling traditions interacted with yoga practice during the last century or so.
Several widely taught sequences and postures date from that period, and some can be attributed to identifiable teaching lineages rather than to ancient sources.
Names are not standardised across schools
The same posture may carry different names in different lineages, and the same name is sometimes applied to noticeably different shapes.
This causes practical difficulty in teacher training and in written instruction, where a described posture may not be the one a reader has learned.
Attempts at standardisation have been made and have not fully succeeded, largely because the schools involved have no shared authority to defer to.
Translation flattens the vocabulary
English names tend towards the descriptive, naming the shape or the direction, which is clear but loses the reference the original carried.
Sanskrit names encode grammar as well, with compound endings that indicate whether a posture is upward, half, revolved or bound.
Students who learn those elements can often decode an unfamiliar name, which is a practical argument for retaining the vocabulary rather than a purely traditional one.