Other forms: drakes
A drake is a male duck. A mallard drake, the drake has the green head, drakes and ducks.
In most species the drake is the brightly coloured one and the female is drab, because she sits on the nest and needs not to be seen. Duck covers both sexes in ordinary use, which is why drake is needed only when the distinction matters. In summer, drakes moult into a dull eclipse plumage and become hard to tell apart from the females. Note that drake is unrelated to the old word drake meaning a dragon.
1noundrakeA male duck.
“The drake has the green head and the female has none of it.”
drake is a bird.
Middle English drake came from a Germanic compound meaning duck-king — the anad- of the original is the same root as Latin anas, a duck. The king half survives and the duck half was lost.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃reǵ-
Middle English
drake
English, today
drake
From Middle English drake. From Middle English drake (“male duck, drake”), either from Old English draca, andraca (“male duck, drake”) or from Middle Low German drâke, gml, from Proto-West Germanic anadrekō (“drake”) literally “duck leader”. Cognate with Low German drake (“drake”), Dutch draak (“drake”), German Enterich (“drake”). More at annet.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Birds