The word was first recorded in English by about 1325, from French. In 1838 the naturalist Charles Waterton, in his Essays on Natural History, used it to describe what a drake does once a year, when it loses its bright colours and takes on the plain feathers of its mate.
Old French had already used the word by the twelfth century. Behind the French form lay a Latin word, and behind that, a Greek word built from a prefix meaning 'out' and a verb.
In Greek, the verb behind it meant 'to forsake its usual place', or 'to fail to appear'. Its second part traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *leikw-, meaning 'to leave', which may also lie behind a Sanskrit word for 'inheritance'.
DERELICT and LIPOGRAM descend from the same ancient root as this word. DERELICT entered English in the 1640s from Latin, where it meant abandoned, first used to describe ships left at sea. LIPOGRAM entered English in 1711 from Greek, for a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided.
By 1608 Shakespeare's King Lear used it to describe omens in the heavens that were read as a sign of coming trouble. In 1671 the poet Milton used it in Samson Agonistes to describe Samson's lost sight. Today it more commonly describes a striking event above.
