Speight

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic form of spite meaning malice or ill will toward another person ; to annoy, vex or thwart someone out of deliberate ill will
2. An old variant of the word for spite, denoting a malicious feeling toward someone ; a verb meaning to hurt or frustrate another person from ill will
3. A historical spelling of spite, referring to a desire to harm or annoy others ; to act maliciously so as to irritate or obstruct someone

Etymology: The word "speight" is an old English name for the woodpecker, and it had a sibling in Germanic speech. Its ancestors reach back to a Proto-Indo-European root, "(s)peyk-, which seems to have covered a group of birds that included the woodpecker and the magpie. Old English had forms such as "spiht and *speoht, and the same bird name appears in Dutch "specht", German "Specht" and Danish "spætte". In the later Middle English of northern England, the word had become "specht", and it was used for the woodpecker well into the medieval period. The name also survives in a place: the Domesday Book records a settlement called Spehtesberie, now Spettisbury in Dorset, which is named for the bird. That early record is useful because it shows the word was already in use in England long before the written sources most readers would meet. Eventually the word was displaced by "woodpecker", a compound that describes the bird's habit directly.