passerine

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English

WOTD – 13 May 2023

Etymology

The common myna or Indian myna (Acridotheres tristis, top), northern cardinal (Cardinal cardinal, middle), and orange-breasted sunbird (Anthobaphes violacea, bottom) are all passerines (noun sense).

Adjective sense 1 is borrowed from New Latin Passer (“bird genus”) (from Latin passer (“sparrow”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *peth₂- (“to spread out; to fly (in the sense of spreading out wings)”)) + English -ine (suffix meaning ‘of or pertaining to’).

Adjective sense 2 is borrowed from New Latin passerinus (“bird species”) + English -ine. Passerinus is derived from Latin passerīnus (“of or fit for sparrows”), from passer (“sparrow”) (see above) + -īnus (suffix meaning ‘of or pertaining to’).

The noun is borrowed from New Latin Passerinae (“former order of birds”), a calque of French passereaux, the plural of passereau (“sparrow; passerine (bird of the order Passeriformes)”), from Latin passer (“sparrow”) (see above) + -eau (suffix forming diminutive masculine nouns, specifically the names of young animals).

cognates

Pronunciation

Adjective

passerine (not comparable)

  2. Of or relating to the Passeriformes order of perching birds, which are generally anisodactyl (“having three toes pointing forward and one back, which facilitates perching”).
    Antonym: nonpasserine
  4. (archaic) Chiefly in the former names of some birds: approximately the size of a sparrow.

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

passerine (plural passerines)

  1. Any bird of the order Passeriformes, which comprises more than half of all bird species.
    Synonyms: passeriform; see also Thesaurus:passerine
    Antonym: nonpasserine
    • 1840, William Whewell, “Aphorisms Concerning the Language of Science. Aphorism XVI. In the Composition and Inflexion of Technical Terms, Philological Analogies are to be Preserved if Possible, but Modified According to Scientific Convenience.”, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History. , volume I, London: John W Parker, ; Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: J. and J. J. Deighton, →OCLC, paragraph 3, pages cx–cxi:
      If we examine the names of the Orders of Birds, we find that they are in Latin, […] We might venture to anglicize the terminations of the names which Cuvier gives to the divisions of these Orders: thus the Predators are the Diurnals and the Nocturnals; the Passerines are the Dentirostres, the Fissirostres, the Conirostres, the Tenuirostres, and the Syndactyls: the word lustre showing that the former termination is allowable.

Translations

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 “passerine, adj. and n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2023; “passerine, adj. and n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Further reading

Anagrams

French

Noun

passerine f (plural passerines)

  1. passerine

Further reading

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