aileron
The origin and history of aileron.
Etymology
Aileron was borrowed from French, where it is a diminutive of aile, meaning wing, and originally described the tip of a bird's wing used to steer its flight. The word first appeared in print in the 7th edition of Cassell's French-English Dictionary in 1877, and it began to be used for the part of an aeroplane wing around 1908, in a French aviation journal.
