Why this word is great
MORKIN — [Noun] A domestic animal, particularly a sheep or cow, that has died of disease or misadventure. Probably from Old French mortecine, from Medieval Latin morticinus ("dead, of a dead animal"), from Latin mort-, mors ("death"). Unlike "carrion," which speaks only of the rotting feast, or "fatality," a stark term reserved for human tragedy, morkin names the whole, silent casualty and the quiet, inglorious manner of its passing. It is the ewe folded in the ditch after a swift blight, the bullock felled by lightning in the far pasture, the specific, unsalvageable weight of a beast that will never be herded home—a testament to the small, constant arithmetic of loss that underpins all husbandry.