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Here’s three linguistic facts about unicorns!

The word “unicorn” comes from the Latin ūnus meaning “one” and cornū meaning “horn”.

The second word is actually related to “horn”. However, the English word “corn” is not (directly) related to the Latin cornū, and instead is cognate to grānum meaning “grain”.
The French word for “unicorn” is licorne.

Basically, the Old French word unicorne was reanalyzed as une icorne (a unicorn).
So, when the definite article le (the) preceded it, the phrase would be l’icorne (the unicorn). This is because le contracts to l’ before a vowel.

Finally, l’icorne was reinterpreted as licorne. Therefore, we have the Modern French une licorne (literally “a the-icorn”)

The last of the linguistic facts about unicorns is that the way the word “unicorn” transformed from a specific type of mythical beast to something that’s generally rare is a type of lexical evolution called “generalization”.

The same thing happened with the Old English bridd, which specifically meant a fledgling, but now gives us “bird”.

The opposite change, called “specialization”, happened with the Old English fugol meaning “bird”, which now simply gives us “fowl”.

Speaking of “bridd” and “bird”, here’s a useful article about the concept of “metathesis”, which is the root behind that change of “r”!