Ben Crowder / Blog

Pied-de-grue

I’ve been reading The Story of French with my wife and came across a fascinating little tidbit: the English word pedigree comes from pied-de-grue, “crane’s foot”, apparently “a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession.” Very cool and not at all what I expected. (The OED has the Anglo-Norman original as pé de grue, by the way, which is basically the same thing.)