A bird that lives on or frequents heathland; a bird of open, uncultivated terrain covered with low shrubs.
From Old English 'hæth' (heath, open uncultivated land) + 'brid' (bird). Compounds describing creatures by their habitat are common in older English, though this term is archaic and rarely used in modern language.
Old English had wonderful compound words that literally described what something was—'heathbrd' just means 'the bird of heaths!' This way of stacking simple words to create meaning is how languages naturally expand without borrowing words from other languages.
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