A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
bittern
Two unrelated things share this word. First, a squat, secretive heron of dense reedbeds, mottled brown and vertically streaked, which freezes with its bill straight up. The male produces a boom you feel more than hear, carrying miles across a marsh. Second, in salt-making, the bitter liquor left in the pan after sodium chloride has crystallized out, holding the magnesium, bromine, and iodine that would not fit into the salt.
Etymology
The bird comes through Middle English bitour from Old French butor, which appears to be a Gallo-Roman blend, butitaurus — Latin būtiō, the bird itself, welded onto taurus, bull, for the voice. Bull-bittern. Old English had its own name, hæferblæte, roughly goat-bleater, which was reaching for the same idea by a different animal. The salt-works bittern is not related at all: it is simply bitter, Old English biter, with a suffix, and it means exactly what it says.
Notes
American folk names go after the voice too — stake-driver, thunder-pumper, and in some places bog-bull. The boom is made with an inflated esophagus and is one of the lowest-pitched calls of any bird; individuals can be told apart by it, which is how surveys count a bird almost nobody sees.