culver - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

IPA(key): /ˈkʌlvə/
Rhymes: -ʌlvə

From Middle English culver, from Old English culufre, culfre, culfer, possibly borrowed from Vulgar Latin *columbra, from Latin columbula (“little pigeon”), from Latin columba (“pigeon, dove”).

culver (plural culvers)

(now UK, south and east dialect or poetic) A dove or pigeon, now specifically of the species Columba palumbus.
- c. 1620, anonymous, “Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song” in Giles Earle his Booke (British Museum, Additional MSS. 24, 665):
  The palsie plagues my pulses
  when I prigg yoͬ: piggs or pullen
  your culuers take, or matchles make
  your Chanticleare or sullen
- 1885, Richard F[rancis] Burton, transl. and editor, “Uns al-Wujud and the Wazir’s Daughter al-Ward Fi’l-Akmam or Rose-in-Hood. [Night 376.]”, in A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night […], Shammar edition, volume V, [London]: […] Burton Club […], →OCLC, page 49:
  Then he walked on a little and came to a goodly cage, than which was no goodlier there, and in it a culver of the forest, that is to say, a wood-pigeon, the bird renowned among birds as the minstrel of love-longing, with a collar of jewels about its neck marvellous fine and fair.

From culverin, perhaps by confusion with culver (“dove or pigeon”).[1]

culver (plural culvers)

A culverin, a kind of handgun or cannon.
- 1805, Walter Scott, “Canto Fourth”, in The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem, London: […] [James Ballantyne] for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, […], and A[rchibald] Constable and Co., […], →OCLC, stanza XVII, page 108:
  Falcon and culver on each tower / Stood prompt, their deadly hail to shower; […]
^ “culver, _n._2”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.

culver

alternative form of culvere