erne

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The Word of the Day for October 15 is: 

erne   \ERN\   noun
         : eagle; especially : a long-winged sea eagle (_Haliaetus albicilla_) 
with a short white wedge-shaped tail

Example sentence:
          “The two men in question were in the vicinity of an erne's nest on 
Mull in March last year….” (Sinclair Dunnett, _The Scotsman_, February 5, 2000)
 

Did you know?
          What do ernes, crows, finches, wrens, owls, and sparrows have in 
common (besides feathers and beaks and other avian traits)? Wing your way 
through one thousand years of ornithological and etymological history, and you 
will alight on an Old English lexicon wherein these birds had basically the 
same names as they have now. Their names were spelled a little differently back 
then: "earn," "crawe," "finc," "wrenna," "ule," and "spearwa." All those avian 
names are also birds of a feather in that their ancestors are akin to Old High 
German words: "arn," "krawa," "fincho," "rentilo," "uwila," and "sparo," 
respectively.





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