The story
- Japanese · derived from無人島“desert island”
- French · borrowed fromBonin
- English todayBonin
From French Bonin in an 1817 monograph on the islands by the French scholar Rémusat, misunderstanding Japanese 無人島 (mujintō, “desert island”) as a proper name for the Ogasawaras, misreading the kanji as the related pronunciation buninjima, and then mistranscribing the vowel into French.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.