Trending: ‘crawdad’

Delia Owens, the first-time novelist whose Where the Crawdad Sings made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning about her life, her home, and her writing, sending crawdad to the top of our searches on March 17th, 2019.

Crawdad is the synonym of the words crawfish and crayfish that is used chiefly west of the Appalachians to mean the aquatic animal that looks like a small lobster and lives in rivers and streams.

It seems logical that crawfish and crayfish have the word fish as part of their names, but that logic was imposed long after the fact: these words derive from the medieval French word creveis, the second syllable of which sounded enough like -fish that the name evolved to have the English word replace its original ending.

Author Delia Owens used an expression her mother told her during her childhood in Georgia for her book's title:

I learned from a book that crawdads don't really sing. But I learned from my mother that if you go far enough into the wilderness by yourself, and there's nothing but you and nature, you will hear the crawdads sing.