Why does “Streifenhörnchen” (chipmunk) contain the word for “horn”?

Streifenhörnchen — “chipmunk” — looks like Streifen (stripe) + Hörnchen (“little horn,” from Horn). That’s a satisfying reading, but it’s a false trail: Hörnchen for small squirrel-like animals doesn’t come from Horn at all. It’s a reshaping of a much older Germanic word for the animal that just happened to start sounding like “horn” — a name people re-explained rather than one that was ever really about horns.

The word behind it is Eichhörnchen (squirrel), from an old Germanic root unrelated to Horn — but once its first part got reinterpreted as Eiche (“oak”), the rest of the word drifted to match a familiar German ending, and -hörnchen became a normal, if accidental, suffix for the whole squirrel family. That’s why Streifenhörnchen carries “horn” in its name for reasons that have nothing to do with horns.