A turkey-cock.

1

1800.  

        But how, alas! they were deceiv’d,
To find poor gobble grown much worse.
The Turkey-cock and Tractors, Lancaster (Pa.) Journal, Dec. 20.    

2

1834.  I thought an old gobbler would have twisted his head off, in his solicitude to get his head in such a position, that he might take a fair squint at me.—Knick. Mag., iii. 32 (Jan.).

3

1836.  They seemed to me about the size of a big Christmas turkey gobbler, without feathers.—W. T. Porter, ed., ‘A Quarter Race in Kentucky,’ etc., p. 17 (1846).

4

1843.  I never see an old gobbler with his gorget, that I don’t think of a kernel of a marchin’ regiment.—Haliburton, ‘The Attaché,’ i. 197. (N.E.D.)

5

1845.  “I am going to shoot a gobbler that I hear on the hill side,” said Jim. “I hear no turkey,” replied Hughes.—‘The Cincinnati Miscellany,’ ii. 11.

6

1847.  Well, it was a nice weddin—sich ice cakes and minicles and rasins and oringis and hams, flour doins and chicken fixins, and four oncommon fattest big goblers rosted I ever seed.—T. B. Thorpe, ‘The Big Bear of Arkansas: Billy Warwick’s Courtship and Wedding,’ p. 104 (Phila.).

7

1847.  Not a turkey-gobbler or fat goose is sacrificed in the course of the year, but she contrives to find it out.—Yale Lit. Mag., xii. 232 (March).

8

1852.  Long had the sight of his plump turkeys strengthened the promptings of our innate depravity—and already had we marked the unconscious gobblers for destruction.—Id., xvii. 140 (Feb.).

9

a. 1853.  Woman is as tender as a chicken, and as tough as an old gobbler.—Dow, Jun., ‘Patent Sermons,’ iii. 42.

10

1861.  Ole massa had to raise some money somehow, and he could not sell anything else, so he tole me to catch the big gobbler, and tote um down to Washington, and see wot um would fotch.—Olmsted, ‘Cotton Kingdom,’ i. 35 (Lond.).

11

1880.  The hens and gobblers go in separate flocks in winter, and pair in spring.—Peter H. Burnett, ‘Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer,’ p. 16.

12

a. 1890.  See Appendix XX.

13