shuttlecock

Word origin

From shuttle (from the back-and-forth sense of the word originating with loom weaving) + cock (from resemblance to a male bird's plume of tail feathers).

Used in a sentence

• “In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.”

• “The practice of the game in this country is to keep the shuttlecock in the air by striking it from one person to another.”

• “Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event; she was the little feathered shuttlecock they fiercely kept flying between them.”

Source: Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0