| a comedy (414 b.c.) by Aristophanes. |
[burd] 
| 1. | any warm-blooded vertebrate of the class Aves, having a body covered with feathers, forelimbs modified into wings, scaly legs, a beak, and no teeth, and bearing young in a hard-shelled egg. |
| 2. | a fowl or game bird. |
| 3. | Sports.
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| 4. | Slang. a person, esp. one having some peculiarity: He's a queer bird. |
| 5. | Informal. an aircraft, spacecraft, or guided missile. |
| 6. | Cookery. a thin piece of meat, poultry, or fish rolled around a stuffing and braised: veal birds. |
| 7. | Southern U.S. (in hunting) a bobwhite. |
| 8. | Chiefly British Slang. a girl or young woman. |
| 9. | Archaic. the young of any fowl. |
| 10. | the bird, Slang.
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| 11. | to catch or shoot birds. |
| 12. | to bird-watch. |
| 13. | a little bird, Informal. a secret source of information: A little bird told me that today is your birthday. |
| 14. | bird in the hand, a thing possessed in fact as opposed to a thing about which one speculates: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Also, bird in hand. |
| 15. | birds of a feather, people with interests, opinions, or backgrounds in common: Birds of a feather flock together. |
| 16. | eat like a bird, to eat sparingly: She couldn't understand why she failed to lose weight when she was, as she said, eating like a bird. |
| 17. | for the birds, Slang. useless or worthless; not to be taken seriously: Their opinions on art are for the birds. That pep rally is for the birds. |
| 18. | kill two birds with one stone, to achieve two aims with a single effort: She killed two birds with one stone by shopping and visiting the museum on the same trip. |
| 19. | the birds and the bees, basic information about sex and reproduction: It was time to talk to the boy about the birds and the bees. |
| bird (bûrd) n.
[Middle English, from Old English brid, young bird.] bird'ing n. |
A class of vertebrates distinguished by their feathers and their two legs and two wings. Birds are warm-blooded animals, and their young hatch from eggs.
Note: Some scientists argue that modern birds are descended from the dinosaurs.
bird
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| bird (bûrd) Pronunciation Key
Any of numerous warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrate animals of the class Aves. Birds have wings for forelimbs, a body covered with feathers, a hard bill covering the jaw, and a four-chambered heart. Our Living Language : It is generally believed that birds are descended from dinosaurs and probably evolved from them during the Jurassic Period. While most paleontologists believe that birds evolved from a small dinosaur called the theropod, which in turn evolved from the thecodont, a reptile from the Triassic Period, other paleontologists believe that birds and dinosaurs both evolved from the thecodont. There are some who even consider the bird to be an actual dinosaur. According to this view, the bird is an avian dinosaur, and the older dinosaur a nonavian dinosaur. Although there are variations of thought on the exact evolution of birds, the similarities between birds and dinosaurs are striking and undeniable. Small meat-eating dinosaurs and primitive birds share about twenty characteristics that neither group shares with any other kind of animal; these include tubular bones, the position of the pelvis, the shape of the shoulder blades, a wishbone-shaped collarbone, and the structure of the eggs. Dinosaurs had scales, and birds have modified scales—their feathers—and scaly feet. Some dinosaurs also may have had feathers; a recently discovered fossil of a small dinosaur indicates that it had a featherlike covering. In fact, some primitive fossil birds and small meat-eating dinosaurs are so similar that it is difficult to tell them apart based on their skeletons alone. |