Etymology

goose

G2O1O1S1E1

Today it means: Any of various grazing waterfowl of the family Anatidae, which have feathers and webbed feet and are capable of flying, swimming, and walking on land, and which are generally bigger than ducks. Full definition →

Middle English goos ← Old English gōs ← Proto-West Germanic *gans
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European · inherited from*ǵʰh₂éns
  2. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*gans
  3. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*gans
  4. Old English · inherited fromgōs
  5. Middle English · inherited fromgoos
  6. English todaygoose

PIE word *ǵʰh₂éns Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰh₂éns Proto-Germanic *gans Old English gōs Middle English gos English goose From Middle English goos, gos, from Old English gōs, from Proto-West Germanic *gans, from Proto-Germanic *gans, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰh₂éns. Cognates Compare West Frisian goes, North Frisian göis (also Fering-Öömrang dialect North Frisian gus; Sölring dialect North Frisian Guus; Heligoland dialect North Frisian gus), Low German Goos, Gans, Dutch gans, German Gans, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian gås, Icelandic gæs, Irish gé, Latin ānser, Latvian zùoss, Russian гусь (gusʹ), Albanian gatë, Ancient Greek χήν (khḗn), Avestan 𐬰𐬁 (zā), Sanskrit हंस (haṃsá). * The tailor's iron is so called from the likeness of the handle to the neck of a goose.

Words from the same roots

Old Englishgōs all →

GosfordGosnellGosnold

Proto-Indo-European*ǵʰh₂éns all →

gandergunzel

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.