rare bird, a

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Idioms and Phrases

An exceptional individual, a unique person, as in That wife of yours is a rare bird; you're lucky to have her . This idiom, generally used as a compliment, is a translation of the Latin rara avis , which itself was used from about 1600 on and began to be translated only in the late 1800s.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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