Inside the flat

Just past the middle of the list is o edredão, the duvet, and there is a bird inside it that English has kept in plain sight while Portuguese has hidden it completely. The word came into Portuguese from the French édredon, and French had taken it from the Danish ederdun, which is two things joined: the eider, a large sea duck of the northern coasts, and its down. English did not borrow the finished word. It took the bird on its own, from the Icelandic æður, and built the compound itself, so « eiderdown » can still be read from end to end — first the animal, then the feathers. Portuguese copied the sounds instead, and by the time edredão had settled in nobody could hear the duck any more. The nest is the part worth keeping: eider down is collected from nests that the female lines with feathers plucked from her own breast, which is why the stuff was costly long before it was a bedroom word. O edredão de inverno está no sótão is a sentence about a duck nobody in the room has thought of.