Moults

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To undergo a natural process of shedding old skin or feathers in favor of new growth
2. to gradually replace old hair, skin, or a similar covering
3. to experience a transformation through this periodic renewal process for better adaptation

Etymology: The verb "moults" is simply the third-person singular form of "moult," so the story belongs to the verb itself. Its roots reach back to Latin "mūtō," meaning "to change, exchange, or abandon," which is also the source of "mutate" and "mute." That shared ancestry makes "moult" a doublet of those words: the same Latin base arrived in English by different routes and took on different shapes. The Old English ancestor, a verb reconstructed as "*mutian," survives in the compound "bemutian," meaning "to exchange for." Over time that sense of exchanging an old covering for a new one narrowed into the biological process of shedding skin, feathers, or hair, which is the sense used for birds and insects today. The notion of change at the heart of the Latin word stayed behind in the meaning. The silent-looking "l" is a later addition. Spellers, mistakenly thinking the word was French, copied the "l" from words such as "fault" and "vault." The word was never connected to those words, so the "l" was inserted without any basis in its history.

Synonyms: sheds, loses