The word duck has several meanings in English, the two most cfommon being:
Now, the waterfowl is notable because it sometimes dives under the water. In other words, ducks duck.
So, is the bird named for its habit of ducking? Is the verb named because that’s what ducks do? Or is it a linguistic co-incidence, with no connection between them?
First known use for the bird is before the 12th Century, while the first use in the verbal sense is from the 14th Century. The latter sense is derived from the former. So ducks were ducks before they started ducking.
Thank you, Collibri. That certainly answers which came first.
Are we certain that one is derived from the other, though?
If I understand these etymological notes correctly, data from other Germanic languages suggest that the noun probably derives from the verb, despite lack of early English attestations.
Need not be coincidence. Could easily be the other way around - ducking called that because it’s similar to what those birds do.
Related:
The echo came later.
Why a duck?
I think the noun form was derived from the verb form, even though the first print appearance in English suggest otherwise. The noun use was to call the bird a ducker if I understand.
Verb–
Do you get down from a duck or down from a horse?
Get it right–“How do you get down off an elephant?”
Data point - in Afrikaans, the act of diving is to duik (sounds like “day-k”) but the bird is an eend (sounds like “Ian-t”) ; this agrees with the etymology online observation that the bird name used to be ened in Old English. So the bird was named after the action.
Erm, yes. That is possible. I said the same in the first post.
The OED has the noun-form descending from an Old English verb ducan, meaning “to dive”. It also has the verb-form descending from the same source. Ducan has cognate words in other modern and old Germanic languages.
The noun-form is recorded in English literature before the verb form, but that’s probably because, in the days when not much was written down and even less was preserved, people
had more occasion to write about ducks (which were both game birds and farm animals) than they did about ducking. Most probably both noun and verb forms of the word have existed in English since English became a distinct language.
I slide down the trunk. Why?
Supporting data point in German: the verb ducken refers to the act of making oneself smaller (to go through a low door, to cringe in abject submission or to escape sight or projectiles), but the bird is called Ente and its diving action is called tauchen (to dive). Acording to the Grimm brothers’ dictionary Wörterbuchnetz most Indo-European languages have words similar to Ente (lat. anas)
You don’t get down from an elephant. You get down from a goose.
So you did - sorry.