cormorant

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English cormeraunt, also cormoraunt,^[2][3][4][5] borrowed from Old French cormaran,^[4][6][7][8] earlier cormareng,^[4][8][3][9] modern French cormoran.^[10][5] The Old French word goes back to Late Latin corvus marīnus (“sea raven”),^{[5][6][7][11][8]} recorded in the Reichenau Glosses of the 8th century.^[10] Barnhart, Merriam-Webster Unabridged and Klein analyse it as corp (“raven”), from corvus, and an unrecorded *marenc (“of the sea”), from mare (“sea”) with a suffix of Germanic origin,^[4][3][9] seen in dialect French pie marenge (“sea magpie”);^[4][12] the American Heritage Dictionary adds possible influence from Breton mor (“sea”), as in morvran (“cormorant”).^[12] The OED instead assumes an altered Old French form from the Latin phrase, compares Old Occitan corpmari, Catalan corbmari and Portuguese corvomarinho, and reports that Hatzfeld and Thomas also took the ending from the Breton word.^[10] The final -t is unetymological, as in peasant, pheasant and tyrant,^{[10][6][8][7]} and is already present in the earliest English examples.^[10] Klein explains it by confusion with the ending -āns,^[9] Etymonline by the influence of words such as ancient.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

The sea bird: c. 1320 in the OED, from Orfeo,^[10] a poem the MED and Barnhart date about 1330: "Maulardes, hayroun, and cormeraunt".^[2][4] The MED also lists an older gloss from a word list, perhaps from before 1300.^[2] Collins gives the 13th century.^[13]

Semantic evolution

The bird's reputation for greed appears early: Chaucer has "the hote cormeraunt of glotenye".^[2] From 1531, in Elyot's Boke Named the Gouernour, the name was applied to an insatiably greedy person,^[10][5] since the 16th century also to a greedy thing.^[14] It was used before nouns for "greedy, rapacious" from 1568,^[10][6] and Shakespeare applied it to qualities in 1597, in Richard II.^[10] Johnson (1755) noted of the bird that it is "eminently greedy and rapacious", and gave "a glutton" as a second sense.^[15]

Timeline

• c. 1320 – the sea bird.^[10] The MED and Barnhart have about 1330.^[2][4]
• 1531 – figurative, an insatiably greedy person.^[10][5]
• 1568 – attributive use, greedy.^[10][6]
• 1597 – said of qualities and things.^[10]

Meanings

Noun

1. Any of various large, dark, long-necked diving seabirds of the family Phalacrocoracidae, with a slender hooked bill; especially Phalacrocorax carbo of northern coasts.^[3][13][10]
2. An insatiably greedy person; a glutton: The landlord was a cormorant who took every penny his tenants had.^[10][6][15]

Adjective

1. Greedy; rapacious.^[6][10]

Related words

• corvine
• corbel
• marine

Usage notes

Under the influence of a fanciful etymology, the word was sometimes altered to corvorant, as if with Latin vorāntem (“devouring”): Holinshed's Chronicles has it in 1587, and T. Pennant in 1766 reports Dr Caius's derivation from Corvus vorans.^[10]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. ^ a b c d e f g Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b c d e f g Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ a b c d Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ a b c Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
13. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
14. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
15. ^ a b Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.