bunny [E17th] The first recorded example of bunny, in 1606, reads, ‘Sweet Peg…my honey, my bunny, my duck, my dear’. The word was originally a term of endearment for a person, and was not found as a pet name for a rabbit until late in the 17th century. It is itself a pet form of bun [L16th], a dialect word for a squirrel or a rabbit. The origin of that word is not known, but it is unlikely to be connected with bun [LME] ‘a small cake’, which is also of obscure origin. The 1987 film Fatal Attraction, in which Glenn Close’s character, rejected by Michael Douglas, boils his child’s pet rabbit, gave us the term bunny boiler [1990] for a woman who acts vengefully after having been spurned by her lover.