Other forms: herons
A heron is a tall grey bird that stands still in shallow water. A grey heron, the heron took off, a heron by the pond.
It hunts by waiting, sometimes for an hour, and then striking faster than the eye follows. It flies with the neck folded back into an S, which is how to tell one from a crane or a stork at a distance. Garden ponds lose their fish to them constantly.
1nounheronA tall grey bird that stands still in shallow water.
“A grey heron flapped slowly over the river and landed in the reeds.”
heron is a bird.
Anglo-Norman heiron comes from a Frankish word, imitating the bird's harsh call.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kreik-
Proto-Germanic
*haigrô
Proto-West Germanic
*hraigrō
Medieval Latin
hairō
Anglo-Norman
heiron
Middle English
heron
English, today
heron
Built from
From Middle English heron, heroun, heiron, from Anglo-Norman heiron, from Medieval Latin hairō, from Frankish - and Proto-West Germanic hraigrō, from Proto-Germanic haigrô (compare Swedish häger and Danish hejre), dissimilation of hraigrô (compare Old English hrāgra, Dutch reiger, German Reiher), from imitative of the sound Proto-Indo-European (s)kreik-, (s)kreig- (“to screech, creak”) (compare Welsh crëyr (“heron”), Ancient Greek κρίζω (“to creak, screech”). Compare also egret from the same Germanic etymon.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA