Aasvogel

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large bird of prey found in southern Africa, a vulture that feeds mainly on carrion and dead animals
2. An African vulture that scavenges on carcasses, known in South Africa by a name borrowed from Afrikaans
3. A scavenging bird of prey native to southern Africa, closely related to other vultures and important to the ecosystem

Etymology: The aasvogel is a large vulture of southern Africa, and its name is a plain compound from Dutch: "aas" meaning carrion, and "vogel" meaning bird. Its literal sense, "carrion bird," describes exactly what it does. The name came into English by way of Afrikaans, the language of the South African Dutch-descended population, where the form "aasvogel" was once spelled "aasvoël" in later standard usage. Because the word is a loanword from a colonial settler language, it carries the vocabulary of the Cape frontier rather than of English naturalists alone. The compound is transparent to any Dutch speaker, so the bird was named for its feeding habit before it was named for anything else.

Synonyms: vulture