scad one of several general names applied to fish of the family Carangidae. See also jack and trevally. The origin of the name scad is unknown, and it seems unlikely that anyone could ever establish why some species of the Indo-Pacific, which is where the name is most commonly in use, came to be scad while others took the name jack and yet others trevally. It is usual to attribute confusion in the naming of fish in distant waters to the vagaries of English-speaking colonists, whose naming of the species they met in other continents was often misguided by imagined resemblances between these ‘new’ fish and the ones with which they had been familiar at home; cf. australasian salmon and murray cod. But, in the present case, one is left wondering where the names scad, jack, and trevally came from.
