purple finch

noun

a North American finch, Carpodacus purpureus, having a raspberry-red head, breast, and rump.

Origin:
1720–30, Americanism

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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WordNet

purple finch
noun
North American finch having a raspberry-red head and breast and rump

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
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00:10

Purple finch is always a great word to know.

So is ort. Does it mean:

a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.

a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

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"It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,—no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid."

-Henry David Thoreau

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