Log in or Sign up
  1. black swan love

Definitions

Wiktionary

  1. n. An Australian swan whose feathers are black.
  2. n. An occurrence believed impossible or not to exist.
  3. n. An occurrence believed impossible or not to exist, subsequently shown to exist.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. large Australian swan having black plumage and a red bill

Examples

  • ““Wallabah”; of black swan he observed hundreds, as well as ducks, “a small but excellent kind,” which flew in thousands, and “an abundance of most kinds of wild fowl.””

    The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders

  • “In 1697, a Dutch sea captain chanced upon a black swan in Australia, at which point the null hypothesis was proven true and the white swan theory had to be discarded.”

    Simon & Schuster: The Panic Virus

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

reverse dictionary (7)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. chenopsis
  1. Indian shot
  1. coscoroba
  1. mute swan
  1. whistling swan
  1. cygnus atratus
  1. black swan

tags (2)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. avian
  1. 710f-7

Log in or sign up to add your own tag.

Wordmap

(beta)

Word visualization

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘black swan’.

More lists containing ‘black swan’

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • bilby All swans are black. Oct 12, 2008

  • reesetee Ooh, yeah. True! I'd never connected the two. Oct 17, 2007

  • chained_bear I think the presence of black swans in Australia also was taken as further evidence of Australia being literally the antipodes--in the sense of being completely backward/opposite from everything Europeans had "known." At least, they were still talking about that 20 years ago in Australia (maybe they're over it by now?).... Oct 17, 2007

  • reesetee Interesting, sionnach. I never knew this.

    And by the way, black swans are lovely. Oct 17, 2007

  • sionnach In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's definition, a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.

    The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that all swans were white in color. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.

    The term was introduced by Karl Popper in the context of the falsifiability of the statement "All swans are white". Oct 17, 2007

Tweets

Looking for tweets for black swan.

‘black swan’ has been looked up 1121 times, loved by 1 person, added to 18 lists, commented on 5 times, and is not a valid Scrabble word.