Les Jones

Word of the Day > Word of the Day: Bald, Piebald, Skewbald, and Oddbald

A piebald horse

While reading Phrases.org.uk I ran across an explanation for the phrase "bald as a coot." I knew enough about birds to know that a coot was a bird, as in the American Coot which Andy Axel was nice enough to post pictures of.

I had always assumed the phrase meant something like "as smooth-headed as a coot," but the site offered a different explanation: "Coots are water birds whose heads have the appearance of baldness. This doesn't refer to the lack of feathers on the bird's head, but to their white markings. Bald has several meanings, one of which is 'streaked or marked with white'. That's the meaning here, as in pie-bald."

Backtracking from Phrases.org.uk, I looked up "bald" in Webster's:

1 a: lacking a natural or usual covering (as of hair, vegetation, or nap) b: having little or no tread (bald tires)
2: marked with white
3: lacking adornment or amplification (a bald assertion)
4: undisguised, palpable (bald arrogance)

One of those last two definitions may have given rise to "bald-faced lie." The second definition for bald is related to piebald:

1 : composed of incongruous parts
2 : of different colors; especially : spotted or blotched with black and white

Coots aren't anymore hairless than any other bird, and are less so than some. They do, however, have a white beak on their black heads, and some species have a white forehead. Bald, in the coot sense, means piebald, though it strikes me that "bald as a coot" may have been a clever turn of phrase that conflated two meanings of bald.

I'm not sure I had ever heard of piebald before, and I'm certain I didn't know what it meant, but I like it. Related words, normally used to describe a horse, are skewbald (brown and white) and oddbald (bay and white, with bay being a reddish-brown color).

These wonderful old words don't seem to be in use anymore. Nowadays pinto is used to describe horses with patches of white and another color. There is also a specific breed called a paint horse.

I hope everyone's enjoyed the everyday WOTD for the last few weeks. It will now return to its intermittent schedule.

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