woggin
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "4 mo 19th [19 April 1762] wind Started to Northward got on the [North Carolina Outer] Banks On the Latter Part Calm. Caught 10 wogens. […] 5 mo 10th [10 May 1762] the Wind Came Round to the Northward in a Flurry or hard Squall. Spoke with Seth Clark [master of an unidentified whaler]. Saw Wogæns. I Judge we are Nigh the Banks."
- "Sept 1775 [saw] wargins."
- "Sea Waggin found on the banks of Newfound Land."
- "The poor woggins were also periodically kept alive for a few months in Louis XVI's menagerie at Versailles."
- "at 1 PM Sent our Boat on Shore After Some refreshments She returned with A Plenty of Woggins we Cooked Some for Supper."
- "It was accordingly done by the command of the Captain, when the woggin, in a stately manner, walked as, and showed signs of happiness and contentment. He was perfectly tame, would suffer the approach of any one of the crew, ..."
Etymology
Unknown. Found from at least 1762 through the late 1800s, at first in reference to auks. Olson and Lund speculate it initially referred to auks, followed penguin in being applied to Southern penguins, and fell out of use for auks after they went extinct, and for penguins after being displaced by penguin; they say "Beane’s (1905: 88) rendering of the cry of a penguin as “wauk” suggests a possible onomatopoeic origin", or it may be connected to woggle (“wobble”), a word "used in connection with the great auk" (e.g. in a 1672 work by John Josselyn; and the 1885 Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York says early writers "quaintly called [auks] 'wobble-birds'").