Other forms: ducklings
A duckling is a baby duck. A row of ducklings, the ugly duckling, follow like a duckling.
Ducklings imprint on the first moving thing they see and follow it, which is how Konrad Lorenz ended up with a line of them behind him. They can swim within a day of hatching. The ugly duckling of the story is a swan, which is the point.
1nounducklingA baby duck.
“A mother duck led her line of ducklings across the road to the pond.”
duckling is a young bird.
Duck plus the diminutive -ling, which marks a young or small thing, as in gosling and nestling.
Middle English
dokeling
English, today
duckling
Built from
From Middle English dokeling, dukling, dookelynge (“duckling”), equivalent to duck + -ling.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA