peckled

English

WOTD – 30 December 2012

Etymology

Either from peckle (though attested earlier), or an alteration of speckled.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpɛkəld/

  • Audio (Southern England)

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Adjective

peckled (comparative more peckled, superlative most peckled)

1. (now UK dialectal) Speckled, spotted.
   • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC:
     , vol.I, New York, 2001, p.254:

     Jacob the patriarch, by force of imagination, made peckled lambs, laying peckled rods before his sheep.

   • 1972, Edna O'Brien, Night, Mariner Books, published 2001, →ISBN, page 30:

     […] the herons and the cranes and the coots and the didappers and the water hens and the teals and the curs and the drakes and the sheldrakes and the peckled fowls and the flocking sheep, all, all the sirenic and the not-so-sirenic sounds that they let out at the instant of their near-deaths.