A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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drachen
Drachen is the German word for a kite, and also the word for a dragon, and in modern usage it covers hang gliders as well. The distinction between the two main senses lives entirely in one letter of the article, which German speakers manage without difficulty and learners do not.
Etymology
This is a case where English went one way and most of Europe went the other. German named the flying toy after the dragon, and so did Dutch, Polish, Czech, and a string of others, because the thing hanging in the sky on a string with a long tail behind it looked like the beast in the story. English named it after a bird instead: the kite is Milvus milvus, a fork-tailed raptor that hangs almost motionless over a field on a fixed wing, and the toy was named for the way the bird holds station.
Notes
Kite balloons used for artillery observation in the First World War were called drachen in German and the name crossed into English for the type. Meteorologists flew instrumented kites to sample the upper air for decades before balloons and aircraft replaced them, and the German kite stations kept the word on the record.