Kate asked if a clay pigeon for shooting at was so named because it was being likened to a bird or because it was made of clay.

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The root of her question is in the fact that around the year 1450 there appeared from unknown sources a new meaning of the word pig. In this case a pig was not a four footed barnyard animal but a pot or jar made of earthenware.

Of course a pigeon is a bird alternately cursed by some city dwellers and fed lovingly by others.

It turns out that clay pigeons are named after birds not clay pots.

Taking the root chronologically, way back in ancient Rome and likely before that someone constructed a word that meant “a bird chirping” that actually sounded like a bird chirping.

That appears in Latin as pipire.

This happens all the time, people inventing words based on the real life sound of the thing being named it’s called onomatopoeia.

For example sneeze and crunch likely have onomatopoeic roots.

The word onomatopoeia itself is from Greek and literally means “name maker.”

Anyway, with a Latin root word pipire to start from the Romans started calling any young bird for which they didn’t have a more specific name pipio.

What was once Latin so often ends up in French and by the time William the Conqueror set foot on English shores the word had morphed into pigeon.

At that point it still didn’t refer specifically to those things that poop on window ledges downtown.  It specifically included them but it more generally meant a bird or something bird-like.

Aside from hating city pigeons hunters have long loved shooting pigeons.  So much so that when there were no real pigeons around they still liked to practice and shoot at pretend pigeons.

These were also called pigeons and our first clear citation with this “target practice” meaning is around 1877.

It wasn’t until 1909 that we have a citation for clay pigeon.

Now a clay pigeon is kind of like a decoy and it was this similarity that made the phrase stool pigeon possible. The idea is that someone who actually reports to the authorities works themselves into a group of bad guys and as a decoy, gets accepted by them.