What are spraints?
Word count: 230 words
Reading time: Less than 1 minute
Building your vocabulary is always a good idea. It benefits your reading and it also helps you be more specific and precise in your writing. Here is my word of the week.
I learned a new word this week: spraints.
If it’s new to you as well, see if you can guess its meaning by reading this sentence from the book The London Train by Tessa Hadley.
“She showed them a dusty depression on the bank that might be where the otters slept by day, and their spraints nearby, blackish messes of fish scales and fagments of bone, probably eel bones.”
I figured “spraints” meant scat or droppings and asked my husband, who has a degree in zoology, if he was familiar with the word. “It sounds like a hillbilly term,” he said. “You know, ‘I spraint my ankle’.”
Putting my husband’s questionable humour aside, I consulted a dictionary and learned it meant otter’s dung, which seemed a bizarrely specific term. Why is otter poop so venerated it earns its own name? If anyone can explain the reason why, please let me know.
Meanwhile, I can tell you the word comes from the Medieval French verb espreindre, meaning to press out. Which also seems a tad more than I want to know.
Photo courtesy Peter Kaminksi, Flickr Creative Commons
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Posted May 2nd, 2012 in Word of the week
