different between ossifrage vs osprey

English

Etymology

From Middle French ossifrage, from Latin ossifraga (“osprey”), ossifragus (“osprey”), from ossifragus (“bone breaking”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /??s?f??d??/

Noun

ossifrage (plural ossifrages)

1. (archaic) Gypaetus barbatus, the diet of which is almost exclusively bone marrow.
   • 1611, King James Version, Leviticus 11:13:

     And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray […]

   • 1880, [uncredited English translator], The Man who Laughs by Victor Hugo, Book the Third, Chapter I:

     Calcareous lies, slate, and trap are still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and leveled those bristling, rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage.

   • 1885, Richard Francis Burton, The Book of the Thousand and One Nights Story 162, "The Spider and the Wind":

     Yes; for these two passions, when they enter into a man, alter his wisdom and understanding and judgment and wit, and he is like the Ossifrage which, for precaution against the hunters, abode in the upper air, of the excess of his subtlety […]

   • 1922, James Joyce, Ulysses, Part II, Chapter 14:

     The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage.

2. (obsolete) The young of the sea eagle or bald eagle.
3. (Britain) The osprey.
   • 1601, Philemon Holland, The Historie of the World. Commonly called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, Book X, Chapter 3:

     And their young Ospraies bee counted a kind of Ossifragi: from them come the lesser Geires, they againe breed the greater, which engender not at all. Some reckon yet another kind of Ægle, which they cal Barbatæ; and the Tuscanes, Ossifrage.

   • 1871 Robert Browning,Balustrion's Adventure: A Transcript from Euripides, line 117–24:

     And we were just about

     To turn and face the foe, as some tire bird

     Barbarians pelt at, drive with shouts away

     From shelter in what rocks, however rude,

     She makes for, to escape the kindled eye,

     Split beak, crook'd claw o' the creature, cormorant

     Or ossifrage, that, hardly baffled, hangs

     Afloat i' the foam, to take her if she turn.

References

For use of the term to refer to ospreys in England as well as the misidentification of sea eagles as ossifrage, see Theodore Gill, "The Osprey or Fishhawk: Its Characteristic and Habits," The Osprey: An Illustrated Magazine of Popular Ornithology, Volume V, no. 2, pp. 25–26 (Nov.-Dec. 1990).

Latin

Noun

ossifrage

1. vocative singular of ossifragus

English

Etymology

From Late Middle English ospray, from Anglo-Norman ospriet, from Medieval Latin avis prede (“bird of prey”), a generic term apparently confused with this specific bird in Old French on its similarity to ossifrage.

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /??sp?i/
• (UK) IPA^(key): /??sp?e?/

Noun

osprey (plural ospreys)

1. A bird of prey (Pandion haliaetus) that feeds on fish and has white underparts and long, narrow wings each ending in four finger-like extensions.
   • 1594, George Peele (attributed), The Battle of Alcazar

     I will provide thee of a princely osprey.

   • c. 1612-13, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Two Noble Kinsmen

     But (oh Jove!) your actions, / Soon as they move, as ospreys do the fish, / Subdue before they touch. Two Noble Kinsmen

2. aigrette (ornamental feather)

Synonyms

• fish eagle (a misnomer as the osprey is not an eagle, but compare some of the translations below)
• fish hawk (a misnomer as the osprey is not a hawk)
• orfray (obsolete, incorrect)
• ossifrage (from Latin "bone-breaker")
• osspringer (obsolete)

Translations

Anagrams

• Poyers