Macaroni penguin "chrysolophus" is derived from the Greek words "chryse" "golden", and "lophos" "crest". The common name was recorded from the early 19th century in the Falkland Islands. English sailors apparently named the species for its conspicuous yellow crest; Maccaronism was a term for a particular style in 18th-century England marked by flamboyant or excessive ornamentation. A person who adopted this fashion was labelled a "maccaroni" or "macaroni", as in the song "Yankee Doodle". Molecular clock evidence using DNA suggests the macaroni penguin split from its closest relative, the royal penguin ("Eudyptes schlegeli"), around 1.5 million years ago. The two have generally
Macaroni (fashion) of "the Macaroni Club, which is composed of all the traveled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses". The "club" was not a formal one; the expression was particularly used to characterize fops who dressed in high fashion with tall, powdered wigs with a chapeau bras on top that could only be removed on the point of a sword. The shop of engravers and printsellers Mary and Matthew Darly in the fashionable West End of London sold their sets of satirical "macaroni" caricature prints, published between 1771 and 1773. The new Darly shop became known as "the Macaroni Print-Shop".