hedgehog

From Middle English heyghoge, a compound of hedge and hog. It eventually pushed aside the older non-native word yrchoun (from Old French hirchoun/herichon) and the even earlier native English word il (from Old English īl, iġil).

The spiny little animal kept its plain, homely name of hedge plus hog even as competing borrowed words fell away, leaving the descriptive English compound as the survivor. In the twentieth century the word also picked up a philosophical sense, coined by Isaiah Berlin in his 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, to describe someone devoted to one big idea.

The name replaced two earlier English words for the same animal — yrchoun, borrowed from Old French, and il, from Old English — so hedgehog is really the compound that won out over its own ancestors.