the.com/cockcrow
Dawn's alarm clock, hardwired into a bird that brags about sunrise before it arrives.
means The very early morning, specifically daybreak — the moment a rooster first calls out and the sky begins to lighten.
from A plain Old English compound, joining 'cock' (the male bird, a word echoed across Germanic tongues) with 'crow' (from Old English 'crawan,' to make that harsh, throaty cry — likely imitative of the sound itself). The pairing is old and literal: the hour when the cock crows. The same image runs through the Gospels, where Peter denies Christ 'before the cock crow,' which helped fix the phrase as a marker of earliest dawn in the English ear.
- internal clock
- Roosters crow on schedule even in total darkness
- pecking order
- The top rooster crows first, by rank
- betrayal timestamp
- Peter denied Jesus thrice before cockcrow
- ancient unit
- Romans named a night watch after it
- built-in earplugs
- Roosters don't deafen themselves while crowing
cockcrow district london — area in newington, london, england named after the sound of roosters in medieval times