Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the 19th century book, A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, a proverb concerning magpies is recited: "A single magpie in spring, foul weather will bring". The book further explains that this superstition arises from the habits of pairs of magpies to forage together only when the weather is fine.
The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans, an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners. [1] Most terms used here may be found in common dictionaries and general information web sites.
Adjectives ending -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. the English, the Cornish). So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. the French, the Dutch) provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' /tʃ/ sound (e.g. the adjective Czech does not qualify as its -ch is pronounced /k/).
Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words. (Sometimes, the use of one or more additional words is optional.) Notable examples are cuisines, cheeses, cat breeds, dog breeds, and horse breeds. (See List of words derived from toponyms.)
From a merge: This is a redirect from a page that was merged into another page.This redirect was kept in order to preserve the edit history of this page after its content was merged into the content of the target page.
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, jays, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers. [1] [2] [3] In colloquial English, they are known as the crow family or corvids.
The English Magpie is a breed of fancy pigeon developed over many years of selective breeding. They can also be very easily spotted in England and in most parts of America . [ 1 ] Magpies, along with other varieties of domesticated pigeons , are all descendants from the rock pigeon ( Columba livia ).