the.com/bill
a name, a duck, a debt, and a piece of paper — somehow all dressed in green
means A bill is a written statement of money owed, a proposed law before it becomes one, a piece of paper currency (especially in American English), or the beak of a bird — among several distinct words that happen to share a spelling.
from This is really several words wearing the same four letters. The money-and-law sense traces to Latin 'bulla,' a sealed document (literally a 'bubble' or rounded seal), which passed through Medieval Latin 'billa' and Anglo-French into English as an official sealed writing — hence the legal 'bill' and the bill you pay. The bird's 'bill' is an entirely separate, older Germanic word (Old English 'bile,' the beak), with no relation to documents at all. Add the personal name Bill (a long-worn short form of William) and you have a perfect coincidence of unrelated roots.
- duck anatomy
- A duck's bill detects vibrations from buried prey
- bird origin
- Bill once meant a bird's beak in Old English
- law term
- A bill is a law before it grows up
- medieval weapon
- The bill was a brutal hooked polearm
- dollar nickname
- Americans call money a bill from posted bills
bill clinton — 42nd president of the united states, 1993-2001
bill gates — microsoft founder, world's richest person multiple times
bill murray — actor in groundhog day, ghostbusters, lost in translation
bill shakespeare — english playwright and poet, wrote hamlet and macbeth