Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Ostrich
/ˈɒstrɪtʃ/noun
A large flightless African bird that runs fast and lays the biggest eggs of any living bird.
The Greek roots
στρουθός
strouthós
sparrow, small bird
Literally: “the great sparrow”
Follow a root:στρουθός1 word
The story of the word
Greek called it strouthós, the same word as sparrow, sometimes with megálē attached to mark the size, and sometimes as strouthokámēlos, sparrow-camel, for the neck and the desert. Latin took strūthiō, and then Vulgar Latin put avis, bird, in front of it, so ostrich carries a redundant bird inside its first syllable. The head-in-the-sand libel is Roman: Pliny wrote that it hides its head in a bush and believes itself invisible.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
In a sentence
An ostrich can outrun a horse over open ground, which the farm's brochure did not mention.