The word cock in English can refer to a tap—i.e., a faucet or spigot; a spout with some mechanism for controlling the outflow of liquid. It’s theorized that this meaning derives from the other meaning of cock (i.e., a rooster), however the evidence is contradictory. According to the Oxford English Dictionary:
The origin of the name in this sense is not very clear: the resemblance of some stop-cocks to a cock’s head with its comb, readily suggests itself; but some of the earlier quotations seem to imply that the power of closing the ‘cock’ was no essential feature, i.e. that a cock was not necessarily a stop-cock, but that the word simply meant a short spout for the emission of fluid; in others it appears to be = nozzle or mouthpiece.
Yet the German language has exactly the same ambiguity: its words for “rooster” and “tap” are both Hahn. This is also noted by the OED:
But in German, hahn has been used in the same sense for an equally long period, and an example of 1503 in Grimm has ‘wenn es (ein kind) einen hän ufgewint, so louft der wein aller aus’ (if the child turns a cock, all the wine runs out), clearly referring to a stop-cock.
Something similar, yet entirely different, is going on in French, where a tap is a robinet, an obsolete diminutive term for a sheep or a calf. The French term has been adopted by many other languages, such as Italian (rubinetto) and Serbo-Croatian (rubinet).
Is the word for a tap in any other language the same as its native word for a rooster, sheep, calf, or some other animal?
The etymology of tap in the context of a water spigot comes from tapping of casks - related to physically ‘tapping’ (striking) a bung or peg (or spigot) into the hole.
In Spanish the word for tap is grifo, which also means griffin. Do mythological animals count?
Talking about cranes, the German word Kranich means the bird, and derived from that the machine is called Kran, but Kran can also be a tap, but only in Central Western Germany (see disambiguation in the German Wikipedia).
Wow—so far we have roosters, sheep, calves, cranes, and gryphons. Any idea why there’s such a variety of animal names linked to faucets? As the OED suggests, it might be the resemblance of the stopping mechanism to an animal’s head, though it’s kind of strange that so many languages use so many different animals. Personally, I don’t think a stopcock resembles a crane any more or less than it resembles a sheep or a gryphon.
I never knew that this usage was restricted to Central Western Germany, I thought it was universal. I live in Westphalia, and here Kran/Hahn for faucet are used interchangeably. As a humorous side-note: if you serve someone water from the tap and they ask what kind of water it is, the answer often is “Kraneberger”, a play on the fact that bottled mineral water in Germany is often named after the town where it’s from, like for instance “Gerolsteiner”.
In the UK, tap water is sometimes (mostly by older people) referred to as “Council Wine”. This is because at one time charges for water were added to local property taxes. Even though the Council had no direct connection to the water company, they were perceived as the supplier.
In the US tap water is often called branch water at least in the context of mixed alcoholic drinks. I remember at about age 12 I was serving drinks – nothing complicated – for my parents and maybe 10 guests. One of them asked for whiskey and branch and I had to ask my dad what that was.
Also, its face kind of resembles my bathroom faucet.
On a serious note, the etymology of the name is not fully established. One is that it derives from the Proto-Germanic tappô, another that it derives from the Old Tupi tapi’ira.
