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An alteration from earlier compound 狭(sa, “narrow”, in reference to the slender body of the fish) + 真魚(mana, “ediblefish”):
/samana/ → /samuma/ → /samːa/
An alternative derivation suggests 狭間(sama, “narrow space”) + 魚(na, “fish”, ancient term, and part of the roots of modern reading sakana), where ma again references the narrowness of the fish's body, but this is problematic, as 間(ma) can only refer to the space between things, not the width of a thing itself.
Another possibility is that sanma is cognate with 鯖(saba, “mackerel”). The two kinds of fish are somewhat similar, and sanma is even called mackerel pike in English. In addition, the voiced plosive /b/ sound in modern Japanese appears to have been pre-nasalized in Old Japanese as something closer to /mb/, and there is evidence of /b/ ⇔ /m/ alternation in various terms in Japanese. There is also Ainuサㇺバ(samba, “mackerel”), likely a borrowing either into or from Japanese. This suggests that modern sanma may have arisen as an /m/ ⇔ /b/ alteration of older sanba.
The 秋刀魚 spelling likely arose quite recently in 1922 during the Taisho period, when a popular poem by Haruo Satō used this spelling. It alludes to the fish's harvest season of autumn (秋) and its blade-shaped body (刀).
As with many terms that name organisms, this term is often spelled in katakana, especially in biological contexts (where katakana is customary), as サンマ.
^ John Batchelor (1905) An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language), Tokyo, London: Methodist Publishing House; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Co.
