thrush
Definitions
General English
General Science
Agriculture
- noun a disease affecting the frog of a horse’s hoof
Food
- A small brown songbird Turdidae family caught in France and Italy for use in pâtés, pies or terrines
Medical
- noun an infection of the mouth or the vagina with the bacterium Candida albicans
Origin & History of “thrush”
Thrush the bird (OE) and thrush the disease (17th c.) are presumably different words, although the origins of the latter are obscure. The bird-name goes back to a prehistoric Germanic *thruskjōn, and has relatives in Latin turdus ‘thrush’ (source of English sturdy), German drossel ‘thrush’, and the now archaic English throstle ‘thrush’. The first record we have of thrush the disease is in Samuel Pepys’s diary, for 17 June 1665: ‘He hath a fever, a thrush, and a hickup’. It may have been of Scandinavian origin (Danish has troske for a similar disease).
