grouse: English has two words grouse, neither of whose ancestries are adequately documented. It has been speculated that grouse the game-bird [16] originated as the plural of a now lost *grue, which may have come from the medieval Latin bird-name grūta, or from Welsh grugiar, a compound of grug ‘heath’ and iar ‘hen’. Grouse ‘complain’ [19] is first recorded in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. It seems originally to have been pronounced to rhyme with moose, but in the 20th century has come into line phonetically with grouse the bird. It is not known where it came from.
