Etymon #17
Bird. The end.
Borrowed from Welsh, the word entered English in 1577, recorded by an English ship's chaplain during an Elizabethan voyage of discovery. Its original sense was not what most readers now picture: it named a different kind of feathered creature.
The word travelled into English directly from Welsh, without passing through any intermediate language. Its Welsh form is a compound of two elements: one meaning 'head' or 'headland', the other meaning 'white'.
The literal meaning was 'white head', but exactly what that referred to has been debated for centuries. The most widely accepted theory holds that Welsh sailors named the bird for the two large white patches between its bill and eye. A second theory points to an island whose rocks had been bleached white by centuries of seabird droppings.
Among the English words that entered from Welsh in the same century, FLANNEL, the soft woven cloth, came into English in 1503. CORACLE, the small round wickerwork boat still used by Welsh fishermen, followed in 1547. All three crossed into English in the sixteenth century, through everyday contact between Welsh and English speakers in markets, ports, and ships.
In 1577, Francis Drake's expedition sailed into the Strait of Magellan and saw flightless birds standing upright on the rocks. They reminded the sailors of the great auk, a large flightless seabird that Welsh fishermen had named in the North Atlantic. The sailors gave the southern birds the same Welsh name. Over the next two centuries the name shifted south, and the original bird was hunted to extinction. The Welsh name now belongs to the southern bird, and has turned far beyond birds entirely.
