Pretty sure insects first evolved flight.
Unless you are counting fungal spores or some shit.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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I meant the insect you would call a fly (the annoying ones that buzz in your ears) vs the word used to describe things in flight (flying bird, flying insect, etc.).
Fly, as in the insect, is from proto-Germanic, so very old.
"To Fly" is from PIE (Proto-Indo-European, which predates proto-Germanic) so it's much older.
Surprising results.
Fly - Etymology, Origin & Meaning https://www.etymonline.com/word/fly
Fly, you fools!
I don't know but you're looking for the etymology of the noun fly.
The term "fly" in the context of pants riginates from the Old English word "flowan," meaning to flow. It refers to the piece of fabric that covers the zipper, not the zipper itself. The term gained popularity in the 19th century when tailors began using it to describe a flap of cloth attached at one end to cover an opening in a garment. This usage was particularly noted for its association with the right side of men's trousers, distinguishing it from women's garments, which may have different openings
edit =from the interwebs, not my words
I'll bet you this also has something to do with the terminology for the rain fly on a tent, most of which have the same kind of flap covering the zippers and/or openings.
Most rain flies don't have zippers, though. They're basically the tent's umbrella.
Every rain fly on pretty much every modern tent has multiple zippers. Full coverage flies (flys?) are now the norm and these require some way to open them in order to let you in and out of the tent, which is inevitably a zipper. Even before this in the canvas tent era, closures may have been done with buttons rather than zippers but the opening points still had fold-over flaps to keep rainwater out, similar in construction to the ones on your pants.
I've only ever owned one tent in my life that did not have a full coverage fly and thus did not require any hardware on the fly itself. It still had folded over gusset flaps on it in various places, and that tent was also crap and was not designed to withstand weather.
If you are making your own "fly" out of a tarp or similar, that's different.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Looking up camping tents, the vast majority have the classic pitched rain fly.
But regardless, that style of rain fly is pretty new, so it's irrelevant to the reason they were named flies in the first place. I doubt it was common for tents to even have zippers when the term rain fly was coined.
Edit: Looking into it further, the term rain fly was coined before the term fly was used to describe the fabric covering the zipper. It looks like calling the fabric covering the zipper a fly came from using fly to describe the fabric covering a tent.
“Refers to the piece of fabric rather than the zipper itself”?
The piece of fabric covering the zipper.
Almost certainly fly as in birds came first. Trousers with a fly are a pretty recent fashion development, like within the last 200 years or so, whereas people have been watching birds since before the invention of language.
I agree. I also imagine fly for insects comes from abbreviating "flying bug" or something like that, so also came after the verb to fly.
Fly as in
Insects fly the same as birds and aeroplanes do, they create air flow around a rounded wing edge, wich causes the air upward of the wing to flow faster than the air under, thus creating a lifting force. And to answer origins, to our knowledge insects were by far the first living flying things, around 300 million years ago with dragonfly relatives. And the group including flies (diptera) came much later, around 240 million years ago !
I meant fly as in the insect you would call a fly (the name, not the act of flying itself). Very cool that insects were the first flying thing though!
Yeah I understood after, hence my very fast edit to add the last sentence about flies existing only from around 245 my
Wait a minute, do microorganisms that tracel in the air count as “flying”? Are there any microorganisms with mini “wings” that flap through the air? I remember a video where mayflies (I think that’s the name?) basically swim through the air, so I wonder how a microorganism will do…
Even if microbes don’t flap little wings, I would argue it still counts as flying as kites are described as flying and they don’t have any wings at all. You also fly in a hot air balloon, and that definitely doesn’t have any wings, it’s effectively floating in air, but we still call it flying. Therefore, microbes are the first flying thing (?)
Depends on the scale. Really tiny microorganism living in the air do not fly, as in they have no active mecanism to physically interact with their environment to move in any way. They just follow the air currents at seemingly random (the exact word is brownian), kinf of like particles of dust that you see in a ray of light. It is not defined as flying and not studied as such