A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
skewbald
Skewbald describes an animal marked in white and any color other than black, most often brown or chestnut, in irregular hard-edged patches. Its counterpart is piebald, which strictly means white and black. An animal carrying white with two other colors is a tricolor, and in American usage all of these are simply called pinto or paint.
Etymology
The second half is the old English bald, meaning having a white patch rather than hairless, which is also why a bald eagle has a full head of feathers. The first half is unresolved; the most repeated suggestion connects it to skewed, in the sense of irregular or set awry, which fits the patching but has never been demonstrated.
Notes
The distinction from roan is the one people get wrong. Skewbald and piebald are patches of solid color with hard edges, produced by pigment cells failing to reach parts of the skin during development. Roan is white hairs evenly mixed through colored ones with no patches at all. One is a map and the other is a blend.