In the modern technique name, 河津 is ateji: a phonetic use of the characters for the town/surname Kawazu, carrying no literal meaning tied to the technique's execution. The same sound かわず is also the classical/poetic reading of 蛙 "frog" (the everyday modern reading being kaeru), and an older orthography of the throw was written 蛙掛け, "frog hook/entanglement" — the source of the frog-like leg-position imagery sometimes cited. The name is further associated with the 12th-century figure Kawazu (Saburō) Sukeyasu, whose family name derived from the Kawazu estate in Izu. As a naming component, kawazu is therefore a proper-noun / place-name borrowing with a homophonic "frog" imagery layer — not a descriptive action term.