moult
/moʊlt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.25 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To undergo the process of shedding or losing a covering of hair or fur, feathers, skin, horns, etc, and replacing it with a fresh one; to change by moulting.
Intransitive verb
name
A surname.
Example Sentences
- "Some birds change colour during their winter moult."
- "Birds moult periodically."
- "[…] molted into a new suit so that he could fly."
- "[…]; but each bird, Red or Black, male or female, has invariably moulted true to colour - a Black has never moulted into a Red."
- "The engorged nymphae were collected on the 2nd August, 1910, and moulted into adults on the 19th September, 1910. Later, they were placed on cattle […]"
- "[…] One of the few Streak-headed Mannikins which I kept moulted into its second-year plumage with a pair of white feathers on its breast and a Scaly-breasted Munia grew several white primaries, as did a White-spotted Mannikin."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *mey-? Proto-Indo-European *meyth₂-der. Latin mūtōder. Old English *mutian Middle English mouten English moult From Middle English mouten, from Old English *mutian (attested in bemutian, “to exchange for”), from Latin mūtō (“to (re)move, change, vary, mutate, exchange, abandon”). Doublet of mute and mutate. The unetymological ⟨l⟩ was introduced into the spelling by mistakenly assuming a French origin with -l- as in fault and vault; compare solder, which in contrast has an etymological ⟨l⟩ (from Latin solidāre, “to make solid“) but was historically pronounced without that grapheme's sound.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /moʊlt/
- British English: /mɒlt/