rabbit

Rabbits arrived in Britain as linguistic outsiders, probably brought from France in the late Middle Ages; English already had a perfectly good native word, hare, but it named a different animal. The earliest English form, rabet, appears in the late 14th century and meant a young rabbit, while the adult was still called a coney. Then coney became awkward: its resemblance to a vulgar term for female anatomy encouraged speakers to retire it, and rabbit took over the whole burrow. The word’s deeper ancestry is wonderfully foggy—Middle Dutch robbe meant both “rabbit” and “seal,” while a possible connection with rubbing remains only a guess. By 1843, pulling rabbits from hats was already a recorded conjuring trick; in Cockney rhyming slang, “rabbit and pork” means “talk,” leaving modern English with a word that can suggest a mammal, a magic trick, or simply too much conversation.