Cock (noun)

The noun cock has several meanings. One group is from ornithology, one from pipework, and AWE deals with three others out of the nine nouns (and two of the six verbs, as well as a miscellaneous collection of various compounds and phrases).

• A cock is a male bird. When a particular species is denoted, it is the adult male of the domestic fowl (Gallus domesticus). This is called a rooster, or sometimes a cockerel, in American English, perhaps for euphemistic motives.
  • Because of this bird's habit of crowing early in the morning in farmyards, or close to houses where it was kept, cock came to be used as a primitive indication of time. The Bible, Shakespeare and Chaucer all use phrases such as "at first cock" to mean 'early in the morning', 'at day-break'. This time can be labelled cock-crow.
  • The betting 'sport' of cock-fighting, in which these birds were set to fight, often to the death, in a closed arena called a cockpit, gave rise to many expressions such as fighting cock, used figuratively of physically aggressive men, and cock of the walk (or school, ship, etc) to mean 'champion of [a particular area or institution]' - the most aggressive, and successful, in fighting. A male turkey - a turkey-cock - on the other hand, which is regarded as making more noise than damage, has given its name as a metaphor for a man who blusters, talks more than he fights physically.
    • Some of these aspects of the domestic cock's behaviour doubtless lie behind the Cockney sobriquet 'cock' (sometimes 'cocker') to mean any male acquaintance, as 'ducks' or 'duckie' may be adopted for any acquaintance of a female speaker in London, and 'hen' is applied to any female person in Glasgow.
• Most species of bird may be divided into cock and hen birds, although some use other words, such as members of the genus Anas may be divided into ducks (female) and drakes (male), and other water-fowl may be goose (f) and gander (m). Only the male of the common European species 'blackbird' (Merula turdus) is black; the hen 'black'bird is brown, leading some feminists to propose that the species be renamed 'brownbird', and the male a cock brownbird.
  • Some species of bird incorporate cock into their names, such as woodcock (Scolopax rusticula) and peacock (with its female peahen) (Pavo cristatus). Moorcock is an interesting case. In Standard English, it most often refers to the male of the species more usually called moorhen (Gallinula chloropus); in northern dialects, it is the name of the species more generally called 'grouse' (Lagopus lagopus), whose female is called in those dialects a moorhen.
  • A Mountain Cock or Cock of the Woods is a male capercailyie (or capercailzie), or Wood-grouse (Tetrao urogallus). A cock o' the north is a brambling, or Mountain (or bramble) Finch (Fringilla montifringilla).
• Weather vanes such as are often seen on church towers were traditionally decorated so that the 'down-wind' side (that with the bigger area, opposite the pointing arrowhead that indicates the wind direction) was in the form of a crowing cock. So they are called weather-cocks - and have become a disparaging Figure of Speech for politicians, etc, who seem always to be following the prevailing mood.
• A cock is also a kind of valve, used for closing off the flow of fluid in a pipe. In domestic plumbing, there are stopcocks by which water may be cut off, and ballcocks which shut off flow into a cistern when the water-level is high enough; in less domestic contexts, aircocks and oilcocks are parts of various machines, as the steamcock was in the 19th century. A sea-cock is a pipe allowing sea water to enter a ship, or waste water to leave a marine boiler etc to the sea: 'opening the sea-cock' is one way of scuttling, or sinking, a vessel.
  • Originally, a cock appears not necessarily to have had a tap. It was simply a "A spout or short pipe serving as a channel for passing liquids through" (OED). It is this meaning that, it may be speculated, lies behind the common slang word for a penis characterized by COBUILD as "INFORMAL, VERY RUDE"
• The rarer meanings of the noun are:
  • 'a pile', nowadays almost entirely limited to a conical heap of hay, a haycock; in the past, one could have 'a cock of dung, peat, or timber' - all normally with an implication of piling the material up to help it dry.
  • a cock-boat, or, in the past, simply a cock, is the smallest of a ship's boats.
  • In Early Modern English, Cock can be a euphemism for 'God', in casual speech and near oaths. Cf. Shakespeare, in Ophelia's 'mad' song in Hamlet, which contains its own sexual pun:

alack and fie for shame,

Young men will doo't if they come too't,

by Cock they are to blame.

Quoth she, Before you tumbled me, you promisd me to wed.

You may also want to see cock (verb) and cock (compounds & phrases), or even cocker.