Other forms: ducks, ducked, ducking
A duck is the water bird with the flat bill and the loud quack — on ponds, in parks, and on a great many dinner tables. The male is a drake, the young are ducklings, and duck is both the animal and the meat.
The verb is the same word and is at least as common: to duck is to lower your head quickly so something passes over you. Duck! is a warning shout. From that comes the figurative sense, to duck a question or duck responsibility, meaning to avoid it by getting out of the way. In cricket a duck is a score of nothing, and in British English duck is also an affectionate form of address in parts of the Midlands and the north.
1nounduckA water bird with a flat bill and webbed feet.
“The children were feeding the ducks.”
2verbdodgeTo lower your head or body quickly to avoid something.
“He ducked and the ball went over him.”
3verbfaceTo avoid something you should face.
“She ducked the question twice.”
4nounmeatThe meat of a duck.
“There is duck on the menu tonight.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
The bird is named after the verb, not the other way round. Old English ducan meant to dive or dip, and a duck is the diving bird — which is why the two words are identical and why the verb feels older than it looks.
Old English
*dūcan
Middle English
ducken
English, today
duck
Built from
From Middle English ducken, from Old English dūcan. From Middle English ducken, duken, douken (“to duck, plunge under water, submerge”), from Old English dūcan (“to dip, dive, duck”), from Proto-West Germanic dūkan, from Proto-Germanic dūkaną (“to dip, dive, bend down, stoop, duck”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA