starling

Starling comes from Old English stær, meaning the bird itself, plus the suffix -ling, which marked smallness or diminutiveness. So stærling was, quite literally, a small stær — a little starling-bird, named twice over for its size.

The word passed from Old English stærling into Middle English as starling, sterling, or sterlinge, before settling into its modern spelling and pronunciation with little change in meaning along the way.

It shares its root with Middle Dutch sterlinck, also meaning starling, showing the word's diminutive pattern was common across early Germanic languages.