Other forms: cormorants
A cormorant is a dark diving bird that stands with its wings spread to dry. A cormorant on the post, watch the cormorant dive, a colony of cormorants.
Its feathers are deliberately not waterproof, which makes it less buoyant and a better diver, and the spread wings are how it dries afterwards. In parts of Asia, trained cormorants were used to catch fish for their handlers.
1nouncormorantA dark diving bird that stands with its wings spread to dry.
“A cormorant dived under the waves and came up with an eel in its beak.”
cormorant is a bird.
Old French cormaran comes from Latin corvus marinus, sea raven.
Proto-Indo-European
*mer-
Latin
mare — sea
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱorh₂wós — raven
Breton
mor — sea
Medieval Latin
corvus marīnus
Old French
cormaran
Middle English
cormeraunt — great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo); other types of aquatic bird
English, today
cormorant
Built from
From Middle English cormeraunt (“great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo); other types of aquatic bird”)cormaraunt, cormaraunte, cormerant, cormerante, cormeraunte, cormerawnt, cormerawnte, cormirand, cormirande, cormoraunt, kormorount, from Old French cormaran, cor-marauntcor-marenc, cor-morant (modern French cormoran), possibly variants of corp-marin, from Medieval Latin corvus marīnus literally “sea-raven”, with the ending -morant possibly derived from French moran (“marine, maritime”), from Breton mor (“sea”), with -an corrupted in English to -ant. Latin is ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European ḱorh₂wós (“raven”), which is imitative of the harsh cry of the bird; while marīnus (“of or pertaining to the sea, marine”) is from Latin mare (“sea”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European móri (“sea; standing water”), possibly from mer- (“sea; lake; wetland”)) + -īnus. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA