entry
coney
/ˈkoʊni/Rabbit, especially the European rabbit; rabbit fur
From Latin cuniculus (European rabbit).
from Latin cuniculus (source of Spanish conejo , Portuguese coelho , Italian coniglio ), the small, Spanish variant of...
from Anglo-French conis , Old French coniz , plurals of conil "long-eared rabbit" ( Lepus cunicula )
Word Ancestry
from Latin cuniculus (source of Spanish conejo , Portuguese coelho , Italian coniglio ), the small, Spanish variant of...
from Anglo-French conis , Old French coniz , plurals of conil "long-eared rabbit" ( Lepus cunicula )
A rabbit arrived in northern Europe linguistically before it arrived in many people’s everyday vocabulary: rabbits were not native there, so Germanic languages had no ancient homegrown word waiting for them. English borrowed Anglo-French conis around 1200, but this was actually a plural form, and English speakers promptly treated it as a singular—an accidental grammatical reshaping that stuck. The ultimate source, Latin cuniculus, may itself have come from an Iberian Celtic language; Roman writers considered the animal distinctly Hispanic, so the word’s deepest ancestry remains slightly foggy. By the sixteenth century, a coney-catcher was a cheat who “robbed” people like a poacher raiding a rabbit warren, a usage Robert Greene helped popularize in 1591. Later, vulgar wordplay involving coney and cunny pushed the rabbit-name toward extinction, while the King James Bible kept it visible; its pronunciation eventually changed from something like “cunny” to rhyme with “bony,” leaving a rabbit hiding in plain sight behind the modern spelling.
The Story
A rabbit arrived in northern Europe linguistically before it arrived in many people’s everyday vocabulary: rabbits were not native there, so Germanic languages had no ancient homegrown word waiting for them. English borrowed Anglo-French conis around 1200, but this was actually a plural form, and English speakers promptly treated it as a singular—an accidental grammatical reshaping that stuck. The ultimate source, Latin cuniculus, may itself have come from an Iberian Celtic language; Roman writers considered the animal distinctly Hispanic, so the word’s deepest ancestry remains slightly foggy. By the sixteenth century, a coney-catcher was a cheat who “robbed” people like a poacher raiding a rabbit warren, a usage Robert Greene helped popularize in 1591. Later, vulgar wordplay involving coney and cunny pushed the rabbit-name toward extinction, while the King James Bible kept it visible; its pronunciation eventually changed from something like “cunny” to rhyme with “bony,” leaving a rabbit hiding in plain sight behind the modern spelling.
Modern Usage
A person regarded as strange or outside the norm, in a Coney Island-related slang usage
Notable References
- Urban Dictionary entry associating coney with a strange person from Coney Island
Kin & Kindred
From 'cuniculus'·European rabbit
Derived Terms
English words from this root
Sources
Free Dictionary
Urban Dictionary
Wiktionary