Missels

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Large speckled songbirds of Europe and Asia, related to the thrush ; old variant spellings of a book containing the prayers and readings for the Mass
2. Speckled European thrushes with a loud song in winter ; an archaic spelling for the liturgical book holding texts used at Catholic Mass
3. A large spotted thrush native to Europe ; a obsolete form of the prayer book used in the celebration of Mass

Etymology: The bird and the liturgical book share one spelling, but they arrived there by different routes. The missel thrush takes its name from the old Middle English word "mesel", meaning a leper, which came through Norman and Old French from Late Latin "misellus", a leper. That Latin word was built from "miser", wretched, plus a diminutive ending, so the root sense is something like "poor wretch." The same ancestor gave English "measles", a doublet of the bird's name that kept the disease sense. Why a leper should name a bird is not spelled out in the sources, but the link between the two is clear enough: the same root produced both the wretched sufferer and the speckled thrush. The spelling "missel" for the liturgical book is simply an older form of the word "missal", which is a separate matter from the bird's name.