Mag + pie

The magpie's English name is a compound. 'Pie' comes from Old French pie, from Latin pica, meaning the bird itself. 'Mag' is a shortened form of Margaret — a common woman's name used as a generic nickname, the way 'Jack' once meant any man. By the 1500s, 'magpie' had replaced the older 'pie' in everyday speech. Nobody remembers which Margaret.

The Latin pica has a separate afterlife in medicine. Pica — the condition of craving non-food substances like chalk, dirt, or ice — was named in 1563 by the physician Jacques Ferrand, who compared the indiscriminate appetite to the magpie's habit of eating anything. The bird that eats everything named the condition of wanting to eat everything.

Magpies have been associated with theft across European cultures. The Italian opera La Gazza Ladra (Rossini, 1817) means 'The Thieving Magpie.' But controlled studies have shown that magpies do not actually steal shiny objects more than other birds. The reputation is a cultural invention — a story about thievery projected onto an animal that is, in fact, mostly interested in food and territory.

Magpies (Pica pica) are among the few non-mammal species to pass the mirror test — the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. Helmut Prior demonstrated this at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2008. The bird that English named after a generic woman and a reputation for theft turns out to have something most animals lack: self-awareness.