peckled
English
WOTD – 30 December 2012
Etymology
Either from peckle (though attested earlier), or an alteration of speckled.
Pronunciation
- (UK) IPA(key): /ˈpɛkəld/
Adjective
peckled (comparative more peckled, superlative most peckled)
- (now Britain dialectal) Speckled, spotted.
- 1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 216894069; The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd corrected and augmented edition, Oxford: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1624, OCLC 54573970, (please specify |partition=1, 2, or 3):, vol.I, New York, 2001, p.254:
- Jacob the patriarch, by force of imagination, made peckled lambs, laying peckled rods before his sheep.
- 1972, Edna O'Brien, Night, Mariner Books (2001), →ISBN, page 30:
- […] the herons and the cranes and the coots and the didappers and the water hens and the teals and the curs and the drakes and the sheldrakes and the peckled fowls and the flocking sheep, all, all the sirenic and the not-so-sirenic sounds that they let out at the instant of their near-deaths.
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