Meanings
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1
noun
an adult male duck
A brightly coloured drake swam beside the plainer brown female.
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2
noun
archaic or literary: a dragon or great serpent
In the old tale, a fire-breathing drake guarded the mountain pass.
Thesaurus
Etymology
The male-duck sense appears in Middle English and is of uncertain origin, perhaps from an unrecorded Old English Germanic form. The literary word for a dragon is a separate inheritance from Old English draca, from Latin draco and Greek drakon, 'serpent or dragon.' The two senses became identical in modern spelling.