Are the words coney and rabbit full synonyms in English? Are there any slight differences in usage or meaning? Are there any cases when one word is more appropriate in the modern writing or speech than another one?
Merriam-Webster and Wiktionary reference coney as a rabbit (especially, the European rabbit) without additional remarks. The OED does the same, but with a note British & Heraldry.
Best Answer
Of Leporids and Country Matters
Rabbit or hare, and familiarly bunny, are now the common words for the critters once commonly called coney. The OED reports that coney is now in “more or less familiar use with game-keepers, poachers, game-dealers and cooks”. J.R.R. Tolkien alluded to this in The Hobbit, for as all readers of Tolkien know, a coney is just an older name for a rabbit, as Bilbo observes when interrogating Gandalf about Beorn the skin-changer, and which Sam later cooks up in a stew:
Rabbits are something of an anachronism in Tolkien’s legendarium, not being native to the historical region he was depicting, so he usually chose an older word to describe them. Our word rabbit originally meant only the young, not the full-grown version, for which coney was reserved. The OED tells an interesting tale for the word coney:
As you see by sense 5b, it turns out that coney used to rhyme with honey and money, but this was just too punny for its own good. One of the citations for sense 5b:
So why do we today rhyme coney with bony instead of with bunny as we once did? Too many uncunning punsters, basically, giving it a vulgar sense. Shakespeare himself did this, as shown later in this posting.
Here the OED’s etymology for coney:
About the time that coney was getting bad press for its punny association with cunny, the word bunny appeared as a more clean-minded but still rhyming synonyn for the rabbit version, making it something of a minced oath. But the pun was already there in the original Latin cuniculus, so it’s been with us for a long time.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Rosalind liken herself to a coney when she’s speaking to Orlando “like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him”:
Notice it’s a decidedly female coney that Rosalind mentions. Shakespeare is being naughty there — or saucy, as he himself put it. Under the historical pronunciation /ʌ/ used in Shakespeare’s thyme, the actor speaking that like would have rhymed coney with honey, and audiences of that age all would have got the joke, just as they did when Shakespeare elsewhere wrote of “country matters”. Without the necessary rhyme, the intended sauciness may well be lost on latterday audiences.
Rabbits and hares are in the Leporid family, which along with rock coneys, make up the Lagomorph order. Rock coneys are a local name for the pika, as OED sense 4 explains. However, it now goes by a different genus: it’s actually Ochotona princeps. But it’s still a coney, even though it isn’t a rabbit or a hare. Sometimes people even call it a whistling hare — not that it is a hare, mind you. Regular folks are very particular about common names for things, you see.
So coney is a sort of older, local, or rustic name for any leporid or even lagomorph, one perhaps still favored by Bilbo’s furriers.
Another place you might come across coney is in the dialect word to coney-fogle, also spelled connyfogle. It means to ingratiate oneself, to cheat by bewildering. [Sources: the English Dialect Dictionary, and also Provincial Words and Expressions Current in Lincolnshire (1866).] This is probably related to the OED’s sense 6 of being a dupe, not to its leporid sense 1, although coney-fogle does sound rather vulgar if you’re a punny-bunny about both halves of the compound.
Coney-fogle may have given rise to the later U.S. colloquialism to honey-fuggle, again meaning to dupe, deceive, or swindle, but not quite so vulgarly. Still seems a bit naughty, though, especially if you haven’t heard it before.