Pets

The thirty-first entry is a muda do pelo, and the Portuguese noun says plainly what the English one keeps to itself. A muda is simply the change. It belongs to the verb mudar, to change, the same verb behind mudar de casa, to move house, and uma muda de roupa, a change of clothes, so a reader meets the animal sense with the idea already in hand. « Moult » offers no such help, and yet it is the same word. It descends from Latin mutare, to change, through an Old English verb taken from it, and reached Middle English as « mouten », with no « l » anywhere in it. The « l » was pushed in during the sixteenth century, when writers fond of Latin spelling put one into « fault » and « assault » as well; here it stuck so hard that it is now pronounced. The same mutare left a second trace nobody hears: « a mew » was the cage a hawk was shut in while it changed its feathers, which is why a London lane of converted stables is still called a mews.