leveret

[prettygoodword]

leveret (LEV-er-it) - n., a young hare less than a year old.


But not a young rabbit, as those are different critters with, it turns out, their own evolving and confusing terminology for young 'uns. (It turns out, rabbit used to specifically mean the young of what we now call rabbits, so they switched to bunny for the young, but that gets applied to all of them now, especially the domesticated ones, so now they're trying kit/kitten. But none of those are hares.) Hares are members of the genus Lepus, though not all of them, and include jackrabbits as well as most species called hares. This one's a leveret European brown hare (Lepus europaeus):


Thanks, WikiMedia!

Recorded in the 1400s, from Anglo-Norman, leveret, hare skin, diminutive of levre, hare, from Old French levere/lievre, hare, from Latin lepus, hare, via stem form lepor-.

---L.

Comments

[flwyd]

Fun fact: "rabbit" got applied to the adults because "coney" sounded too much like "cunney" which was another way of saying the c-word for female genitals.

[prettygoodword]

That, I totally believe.