A small duck or waterfowl; a dialectal or regional term for various small aquatic birds.
Possibly from 'cock' (a small male waterfowl) combined with an onomatopoetic or dialectal element '-awee.' The term appears in regional English and Scottish usage, with origins uncertain but likely imitative of bird calls.
Words like 'cockawee' are regional dialect words that describe birds by how they sound or look—it's the kind of word you'd hear in one village and not find in another. Many such words have completely disappeared because nobody wrote them down!
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