Other forms: squawking, squawks
To squawk is to make a loud harsh cry. The parrot squawked, a squawk of protest, squawking gulls.
It belongs to birds first — parrots, gulls, hens — and the sound is short, flat and unmusical, which is exactly what the word sounds like. Applied to people it means to complain loudly and is dismissive: squawking about the price. In aviation, squawk is the code a transponder sends, and squawk 7700 is the emergency code, which is a surprisingly literal borrowing.
1verbsquawkTo make a loud harsh cry.
“The parrot squawked loudly every time someone walked past its cage.”
2nouncrySuch a cry.
“The hen let out a loud squawk when the fox appeared at the fence.”
squawk is a harsh cry.
The word is recorded from 1821 and is almost certainly imitative, like quack and squeak. Nobody borrowed it from anywhere; it is simply what the noise sounds like in English.
1821. unknown, but probably of imitative origin (compare dialectal Italian squacco (“small-crested heron”) and English quack).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Birds