Bird

How to spell bird

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bird

What does bird mean?

1. nounA warm-blooded, egg-laying animal with feathers, wings, and a beak, most of which can fly.

Bird in a sentence

• A small bird landed on the kitchen windowsill at dawn.

• The children scattered crumbs to feed every bird in the park.

Where does bird come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English brid, which originally meant a young bird or a nestling rather than the whole class of feathered creatures; the broader, general bird was usually called a fugol in Old English, the ancestor of modern 'fowl'. Over the medieval period brid gradually widened in meaning until it had pushed 'fowl' aside and become the ordinary word for any feathered, winged animal. Along the way the word underwent metathesis, the swapping of two neighbouring sounds, so the older brid turned into the modern bird; this same r-shuffling explains why a few old spellings preserve forms like 'brid' or 'bryd'. The origin before Old English is uncertain and the word has no clear relatives in other Germanic languages, which is unusual for such a common everyday term. Because the spelling is so short and regular, the only thing to remember is that the r comes before the d, a leftover from that ancient sound swap.

How the word is built

• bird (from Old English brid: a young bird, fledgling)