English
lapwing
Pronunciation
  • IPA: /ˈlæpwɪŋ/
Noun

lapwing (plural lapwings)

  1. Any of several medium-sized wading birds belonging to the subfamily Vanellinae within family Charadriidae.
    • 1986, Steven L. Hilty, Bill Brown, A Guide to the Birds of Colombia, page 149 ↗,
      Plovers and lapwings are a large, virtually worldwide family that differs from sandpipers in, among other things, having a shorter, thicker, pigeonlike bill and more robust proportions.
    • 2010, Des Thompson, Ingvar Byrkjedal, Tundra Plovers, page 36 ↗,
      The resident tropical plovers have much less pointed wings, and most of the lapwings have fairly rounded wing-tips, a wing shape apparently more adapted to aerial manoeuvrability than to long-distance migration.
    • 2010, Clive Finlayson, Birds of the Strait of Gibraltar, page 244 ↗,
      Lapwings are abundant winter visitors to the area but, like the Golden Plovers, vary greatly in number between years.
  2. The tewit (Vanellus cristatus) (which is a type of lapwing in the first sense).
  3. A silly man.
    • 1602, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V Scene 2,
      This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head.
Translations

This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.002
Offline English dictionary