crayfish

A crayfish is no more a fish than a cat-fish is a cat; the original name of this edible crustacean was "crevice" (no relation to the "crevice" that means "gap"), which was adopted from French in the fifteenth century; this French name, in turn, was a borrowing of the Old German name for crab, krebiz. After entering English, "crevice" remained the standard spelling of the crab-like creature's name until the fifteenth century when its associations with the sea caused people to corrupt the pronunciation and spelling of the word, first to "crefish" and then to "crayfish."

what is an ort?

an ort was originally a scrap of food or leftover fodder not eaten by cattle or pigs. The word then came to be applied to leftovers from the kitchen table, leftovers that were also known as relief or relics. Ort appeared in the mid fifteenth century as a compound of the prefix oor, meaning not, and etan, meaning to eat; quite literally, therefore, orts are the uneaten scraps of a meal.

mark morton is the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Insomniac Press, 2004). His most recent books are The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp through the Language of Love and Sex and The End: Closing Words for a Millennium. He teaches English and Learning Technologies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

previous orts:
catillation
cookie
postpast
frankenfood
pemmican
frangipani
aperitif
flummery
runcible spoon
mezzaluna
fletcherize
abligurition
cornucopia
banyan day
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork