A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
merganser
A merganser is a diving duck that eats fish and is equipped for it. Its bill is narrow and hooked at the tip with backward-pointing serrations along both edges, which grip a slippery fish rather than cutting it, and which is why the group is also called sawbills. It swims underwater with its feet, often with the head submerged and scanning while the body stays on the surface.
Etymology
The name is Latin and joins the words for a diver and a goose, so it means, roughly, diving goose. It was coined by sixteenth-century naturalists working through the birds of Europe with Latin as their common language, and it stayed in use as the English word rather than being translated, which happened to a fair number of bird names from that period.