different between fuckwind vs windfucker

English

Etymology

If the term is a compound of wind +? fucker, it may preserve an old sense of fuck (“to beat, to strike”) which is also found in cognates (for example, Bohuslän Swedish fokka (“to fuck; to thrust, to push”)) but was otherwise lost from English, and it can be compared to the regional synonym fuckwind. (Wright's English Dialect Dictionary compares fuck in the latter word to fjúka (“be driven (by the wind); fly”) instead, while Liberman says the Norse word "has no [other?] cognates anywhere in Germanic".) However, the synonym windsucker is almost as old, and was rendered in older texts as wind?ucker using a long s, so some scholars think windfucker is a misreading of wind?ucker; others think wind?ucker is a bowdlerization of windfucker. Compare the later term windhover and the Orkney term windcuffer.

Modern attestations of the second, vulgar sense are possibly unrelated to the bird, unless of educated and/or heavily dialectal use.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /?w?ndf?k?(?)/
• Hyphenation: wind?fuck?er

Noun

windfucker (plural windfuckers)

1. (archaic) The common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus).
   • 1622 (first performance), William Shakespeare; William Rowley [probably by William Rowley alone], The Birth of Merlin; or, The Childe hath Found His Father. As it hath been Several Times Acted with Great Applause. Written by William Shakespear and William Rowley, London: Printed by Tho[mas] Johnson for Francis Kirkman and Henry Marsh, and are to be sold at the Princes Arms in Chancery-Lane, published 1662, ?OCLC, Act IV, scene i:

     Yes, and a Go?hawk was his father, for ought we know, for I am ?ure his mother was a Wind-fucker.

     In an 1869 version, the word is indicated as wind-sucker.
2. (often archaic, derogatory, vulgar) A term of abuse.
   • 1648 May 16 – June 2, Parliament-Kite, volume II, page 9; quoted in Gordon Williams, “windfucker”, in A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, volume III (Q–Z), London; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: The Athlone Press, 1994, ?ISBN, pages 1540–1541:

     Let Parliament Jone [nickname of a woman acting as an informant for the authorities to identify seditious or unlicensed printing presses] (the Devills windefucker) flie after me if she can; beware Lewis, I have need to mute.

Synonyms

• fuckwind
• windhover
• windsucker

References

Further reading

• common kestrel on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “windfucker, n.”, in OED Online ?, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1926