rabbit: [14] Rabbit was probably introduced into English from Old French. No immediate source is known to have existed, but we do have corroborative evidence in French dialect rabotte ‘young rabbit’ and Walloon robète. The latter was a diminutive derivative of Flemish robbe (Walloon is the form of French spoken in Flanders and Belgium), and it seems likely that the word’s ultimate origins are Low German. At first it was used only for ‘young rabbit’ in English, and it did not really begin to take over from cony as the general term for the animal until the 18th century. [rabbit etymology, rabbit origin, 英语词源]