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Polar Bears are found throughout the Arctic regions. They inhabit the ice floes, waters, islands, and coastlines of the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Greenland. Polar Bears roam far and wide and the people who encounter them have given them descriptive names.

• The word Arctic comes from the ancient Greek Arktikos, or “country of the great bear.” Even thought the Greeks never saw a polar bear, they named the region that lay to the very farthest north after the constellation that is found in the Northern Sky, Ursus Major, the Great Bear.
• The Inuit of the Canadian Arctic called the Polar Bear Nanuk in their every day language. But in their poetry he was Pihoqahiak, the ever-wandering one.
• Both the Norwegians and Danes (Greenland is part of Denmark) call the polar bear the isbjørn, the ice bear.
• In eastern Greenland it is referred to as, Tornassuk, master of the helping spirits.
• The Russians call the great bear biely medved, white bear.
• In the Siberian regions of Russia, a tribe known as the Ket, calls polar bears gyp and qoi. These are terms of reverence meaning grandfather and stepfather.