Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A nocturnal, forest-dwelling wild pig (Babyrousa babyrussa) of the East Indies, having long, upward-curving tusks in the male.
Wiktionary
- n. Any of several mammals in the genus Babyrousa in the pig family Suidae, in which the upper tusk grows upward.
WordNet 3.0
- n. Indonesian wild pig with enormous curved canine teeth
Etymologies
- Malay babirusa : babi, hog + rusa, deer. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Todd, One of Three (I'm going with Son this week), Larry, and dmorris knew that the the babirusa was the animal in question last week.”
“I'm surprised so many people knew what the name was of that stinkin 'animal, I thought a babirusa was an Italian disco dancer from the 70's.”
“In a curious parallel to this combination of anatomical features, the word babirusa combines babi, meaning pig, with rusa, meaning deer.”
The deer-pig, the Raksasa, the only living anthracothere… welcome to the world of babirusas
“The birds, the mammals, the insects of Celebes were distinct from what he had seen in Sarawak, and an animal called the babirusa impressed him especially.”
“The babirusa is a social animal that moves in groups.”
“If you guessed that last week's animal was the babirusa, then you should turn off the Discovery Channel and back away from the TV, because that's something you really have no need to know.”
“These endemic species include the endangered mountain anoa (Bubalus quarlesi) and crested macaque (Macaca nigra) and the vulnerable babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa) and Sulawesi montane long-nosed squirrel (Hyosciurus heinrichi).”
“Besides the aforementioned babirusa and the anoas, this includes the Sulawesi palm civet (Macrogalidia musschenbroekii, VU), which as the name suggests is found only on Sulawesi in lowland and montane forests to 2,600 meters, and around 25 species of rodents.”
“One of the most unusual mammals in Wallacea is the babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa, VU).”
“One obscure report from the 1970s suggests that Sulawesi people associated babirusas with the creation of straight-line furrows, and in 2002 possible babirusa furrows were reported from south-eastern Sulawesi, but this behaviour has otherwise gone unreported from the wild, and was first documented among captive individuals during the 1990s.”
The many babirusa species: laissez-faire lumping under fire again
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘babirusa’.
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SECOND LETTER A
Words in which the second letter is A
Aa, AAA, Baba, Babe, Babel, AAAA, tangential, baby, bach, back, bad, bade and 90 more...
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Swine
For more aporkalyptic fun, see madmouth's Everything's better with a pig in it.
For "references to the Dursleys in Wizard People, Dear Reader, Brad Neely's cosmos-shattering voiceover ...swine, pig, hog, boar, pork, pork bellies, hog cholera, swineherd, pigsty, swine flu, oink, pig in a blanket and 188 more...
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sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
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looked up
Words I've come across while reading and looked up in the dictionary.
deesis, pendentive, revetment, aedicule, stemma, patera, ephod, entrepot, corbel, exedra, volute, archivolt and 1406 more...
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Animal Kingdom
Words of the wild
puttock, starling, Bengal, springbok, quokka, serval, kudu, babirusa, tippler
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animalia
Creatures with interesting names/lives.
salamander, badger, varmint, wombat, skink, tortoise, pika, gnu, pangolin, porpoise, serval, walrus and 53 more...
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ungulate
because they have the lovliest names!
ungulate, pronghorn, okapi, giraffe, llama, peccary, tapir, oryx, dik dik, duiker, eland, gazelle and 30 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for babirusa.
chained_bear Hell, I still don't know exactly what a baubellum is... but then I'm not sure I want to. Oct 17, 2007
skipvia No problem, c_b. I didn't know what a baubellum was until you cited it, so I guess we're even.
Although I'm probably going to avoid going around asking strangers whether or not they have one... Oct 17, 2007
chained_bear Do you think it has a baculum? I'm wondering because I just learned that most mammals have them, except humans. So all of a sudden I'm publicly asking strangers about things I didn't even know existed until a couple days ago (thanks a lot, skipvia!). Oct 17, 2007
sionnach My little guide to mammals assures me that the babirusa does not have facial warts; it is, nevertheless, a singularly ugly beast. Oct 17, 2007
trivet A nocturnal, forest-dwelling wild pig (Babyrousa babyrussa) of the East Indies, having long, upward-curving tusks in the male.
(Malay babirusa : babi, hog + rusa, deer.)
Jun 1, 2007