- 1孔雀（嚴格說是公孔雀；母的叫 peahen）
A peacock is a big bird whose male has a long tail of blue and green feathers, each with a round 'eye' pattern, that he can raise and open into a huge fan. He does this to attract a female, and also when he is showing off or feels challenged. Strictly speaking, 'peacock' is the male bird only — the female is a , and the word for both together is . But almost nobody keeps that neat in daily talk. Walk through a park in Taiwan or anywhere else and everyone calls every one of these birds a peacock, including the plain brown females. Even careful writers slip. So: know the strict rule, but do not be surprised when real English ignores it. The word has a second life as a way of talking about people. Call a man a peacock and you mean he dresses to be looked at and enjoys being admired — a little vain, though it is often said with a smile rather than real anger. There is a verb too: 'to peacock' means to strut about showing yourself off, and 'as proud as a peacock' is a set phrase for someone very pleased with themselves. Note the two things a peacock is famous for in English are pride and beauty, not wisdom or luck, so the feeling of the word is not quite the same as 孔雀 in Chinese.
組成pea + cock. Here 'pea' has nothing to do with the green vegetable — it came through Old English pēa, pāwa from Latin pāvō, the Latin name for this bird, which itself was borrowed from Greek ταώς and probably came into Greek from an older language of that region. 'Cock' is the ordinary old English word for a male bird. So the whole word is roughly 'male pāvō-bird'.
原始詞典資料10 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Peacockname
- 1
A surname transferred from the nickname.
- 2
A township in Lake County, Michigan, United States.
- 3
An unincorporated community in Stonewall County, Texas, United States.
peacocknoun/ˈpikɑk/
- 1
A male peafowl, especially Pavo cristatus, notable for its brilliant iridescently ocellated tail.
- The ſpring diſplaying her elegant taſte, the proud walk of the gold-feathered pheaſant, the light tread of the ſmall-hoofed hind, and the dancing of the ſtar-trained peacock, infuſed joy into the ſoul of the ſpectator of the aſtoniſhing works of the Creator.
- 2
A peafowl (of the genus Pavo or Afropavo), either male or female.
- 3
The meat of this bird.
- When a reader recently inquired if people really eat peacock, I stated that I’d never tasted the bird, roasted or otherwise, and as far as I knew, it is rarely cooked anywhere in the world.
- Nor do many people today long to eat peacock, which was both a privilege and an ordeal reserved for royalty.
- 4
A pompous or vainglorious person [from the 14th c.].
- 5
biologyentomologynatural-sciencesAny of various Asian species of papilionid butterflies of the genus Papilio.
- The large and handsome spectre-butterfly, Hestia durvillei; the pale-winged peacock butterfly, Drusilla catops; and the most brilliant and wonderful of the clear-winged moths, Cocytia durvillei, were especially interesting, as well, as several little "blues," equalling in brilliancy and beauty anything the butterfly world can produce.
peacockverb/ˈpikɑk/
- 1
To strut about proudly or haughtily.
- A routine border-check in upstate New York had turned into a back-room interrogation, and I was worried, because the three friends I was traveling with didn’t respond to authority well. I could almost hear the wry grins cracking their faces as the officers peacocked. “Is U.S. Customs a joke to you?” one officer asked. My friend Alex said, “No law against smiling, sir.”
- 2
To engage in peacocking, ostentatious dress or behaviour to impress women.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。