Other forms: magpies
A magpie is a noisy black and white bird said to steal shiny things. A pair of magpies, chase off the magpie, one for sorrow.
The stealing is a myth: tested properly, magpies avoid shiny objects rather than collecting them. They are among the few animals that recognise themselves in a mirror. The counting rhyme, one for sorrow and two for joy, is still widely known.
1nounmagpieA noisy black and white bird said to steal shiny things.
“The magpies in our garden chatter loudly every morning from the top of the chimney.”
magpie is a bird.
mag-PIE → the bird that came for the PIE
The bird comes down and takes the shiny thing off the plate, as if it came for the pie.
hooks ontopie
From Mag, a nickname for Margaret used for a chatterer, plus pie, the old name for the bird.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)peyk- — woodpecker, magpie
Latin
pīca
Old French
pie
Middle English
pie
English, today
magpie
Built from
From mag, a nickname for Margaret that was used to denote a chatterer, + archaic pie (“magpie”), from Middle English pie, pye, from Old French pie, from Latin pīca, from Proto-Indo-European (s)peyk- (“woodpecker, magpie”). Displaced native agu and aguster, whence haggister.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA