bunting

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   coloured flags, cloth, or paper hung as festive decoration

   Red, white, and blue bunting hung across the village street.

2. 2
   noun

   any of various small seed-eating songbirds with short, stout bills

   A reed bunting perched on a stem beside the marsh.

3. 3
   noun

   a lightweight, loosely woven fabric traditionally used for flags

   The signal flags were sewn from durable bunting.

The bird and flag-cloth nouns are historically separate. The bird name is recorded in Middle English and is of unknown origin. The cloth sense appears in the early 18th century and is also of uncertain origin, perhaps connected with dialect bunt ("to sift"); festive decorations were then named for the flag material. The later infant-garment sense has a separate nursery-rhyme history.

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