A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
grizzled
Grizzled means gray-flecked, with white or gray hairs mixed through a darker coat rather than replacing it. In mammals, it usually means each individual hair is banded pale near the tip, so the animal reads as frosted rather than gray. It is a standard descriptive term in mammalogy and turns up in the names of the grizzled skipper, a small checkered butterfly, and the grizzled giant squirrel.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French for gray. Its most famous descendant is the grizzly bear, which is named for its grizzled coat and not for anything grisly, a separate English word from an Old English verb meaning to terrify. The two have been confused since the beginning, and the bear’s scientific name, given in 1815, is horribilis, which shows which reading the namer preferred.
Notes
The banded hairs that produce the effect are called agouti hairs, after a South American rodent with a strongly banded coat, and the gene controlling the banding carries the same name. It is one of the commonest coat patterns in mammals and one of the reasons that a wild animal seen at distance is so hard to assign a single color to.