drake

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   an adult male duck

   A brightly coloured drake swam beside the plainer brown female.

2. 2
   noun

   archaic or literary: a dragon or great serpent

   In the old tale, a fire-breathing drake guarded the mountain pass.

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.

Topics

External links

• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary
• Google Images