wagtail
IPA: wˈægteɪɫ
noun
- Any of various small passerine birds, principally of genus Motacilla, of the Old World, notable for their long tails.
- (zoology) Short for wagtail platy.
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Examples of "wagtail" in Sentences
- Two other species of wagtail also breed in Britain, the grey and yellow wagtails.
- Something in the style of the birds recalls the wagtail, though they are so much larger.
- The British race, the pied wagtail, has a much darker back: almost black in the male, compared with pale grey in the white wagtail.
- Despite their names they are often confused with one another, as the grey wagtail is a striking bird with plenty of lemon-yellow in its plumage.
- It would seem quite natural to call the wagtail "lady-bird," if that name had not been registered by a diminutive podgy tortoise-shaped black and red beetle.
- Is it known that the pretty pied water-wagtail is called la lavandière from its love of water and its manner of beating up and down its tail as our washerwomen wield their wooden beaters?
- What was generally made use of consisted of vervain, tenia, and hippomanes; or a small portion of the secundine of a mare that had just foaled, together with a little bird called wagtail; in Latin motacilla.
- Grey wagtails are resident, and often found along fast-flowing rivers and streams, while the yellow wagtail is purely a summer visitor, found mainly in wet-meadows such as those on Tealham Moor, a short distance from my home.
- _solopachium_, meaning a "mannikin eighteen inches high"; Saumasius proposes salopygium, a "wagtail"; several editors have _salaputium_, an indelicate word nurses used to children when they fondled them, so that the exclamation would mean, "what a learned little puppet!"
- Others identify more intimate ambassadors: the first dashing yellow daffodil, the rising dawn chorus of birdsong, the earliest appearance of frogspawn in ponds and ditches, the first cut of grass, a pied wagtail over ploughed land and yellow catkins dangling from hazel branches all symbolise spring's arrival for someone.
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