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black swan

noun
/blæk ˈswɒn/UK/blæk ˈswɑn/US

Etymology

From Middle English blak swan, calqued from a Latin quotation from Satire VI (written late 1st century – early 2nd century B.C.E.) of the Roman poet Juvenal: “Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno [a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan]!”. Equivalent to black + swan. Sense 2.1 (“something believed impossible or not to exist”) is from the fact that all swans were thought to have white plumage until black swans were discovered in Australia in the 17th century by Dutch explorers. Sense 2.2 (“rare and hard-to-predict event”) was popularized by the Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007): see the quotation.

  1. inherited from blak swan

Definitions

  1. Cygnus atratus, a swan with black plumage and a red bill which is endemic to Australia.

    • If you tell me that there is or that there is not a black swan or a white raven, I want to know where you mean; and that you can only show me,—no description will answer the purpose.
    • The original propounder of 'all swans are white' presumably based it on a sample of hundreds or thousands; but the verifications before the Australian black swan was discovered must have run into millions

  2. Something believed impossible or not to exist, especially if an example is subsequently…

    Something believed impossible or not to exist, especially if an example is subsequently found; also, something extremely rare; a rara avis.

    • I do but ſpeake in the perſon of Demetrius, & vnder Hippolita ſhadovv vvhat I intend to the rare, and neuer enough vvondred at Moſpa, the black ſvvan of beauty, & madg-hovvled of admiration.
    • A Virgin too, untouch'd, and chaſte, / VVhom Man ne'er took about the VVaiſte. / She's a rare Bird! find her vvho can, / And much reſembling a black Svvan.

  3. A rare and hard-to-predict event with major consequences.

    • Worried that Greece could go belly up? So-called black swan funds – named for rare and unexpected events – offer a way to profit in the event of a market collapse.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for black swan. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA