stork
pronunciation
How to pronounce stork in British English:
UK [stɔ:k]
How to pronounce stork in American English:
US [stɔrk]
-
- Noun:
- large mostly Old World wading birds typically having white-and-black plumage
Word Origin
- stork
- stork: [OE] The stork may get its name from its rather stiff-legged gait. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *sturkaz, which also produced German storch and Dutch, Swedish, and Danish stork. This may have been formed from the base *sturk-, *stark-, *sterk- ‘rigid’, which also produced English starch and stark.=> starch, stare, stark, starve, stereo
- stork (n.)
- Old English storc "stork," from Proto-Germanic *sturkaz (cognates: Old Norse storkr, Swedish and Danish stork, Middle Dutch storc, Old High German storah, German Storch "stork"), from PIE *ster- "stiff" (cognates: Old English stear "stiff, strong;" see stark). Perhaps so called with reference to the bird's stiff or rigid posture. But some connect the word to Greek torgos "vulture." Old Church Slavonic struku, Russian sterkhu, Lithuanian starkus, Hungarian eszterag, Albanian sterkjok "stork" are said to be Germanic loan-words. The children's fable that babies are brought by storks (told by adults who aren't ready to go into the details) is in English by 1854, from German and Dutch nursery stories, no doubt from the notion that storks nesting on one's roof meant good luck, often in the form of family happiness.
Example
- 1. What foods do the stork and the fox struggle to eat ?
- 2. One of its lecterns is a stork with wings arched and neck outstretched .
- 3. A few days later , the stork 's parents are desperate : their son is absent from the nest all night !
- 4. The baby stork says , " nowhere . Just scaring the shit out of college students ! "
- 5. I 've even found a colleague who is quite happy to sustain an interesting conversation about the relative merits of the two moves , flamingo and stork .