Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having comparatively or relatively short wings: specifically noting certain hawks used in falconry, as the goshawk, Astur palumbarius, in comparison with the true falcons, as the peregrine or gerfalcon.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective (especially of certain insects) having very short or rudimentary wings

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Down below, the street names, the buildings, the shipyards and cemeteries are all full of ghost lives that have passed: Ezra Pound went there; Odysseus sailed by; Molly Bloom was from there and remembered its “Moorish wall”; Gilbert White knew his “soft-billed” and “short-winged” birds of passage went through there, but its people today and the people who go there seem broken and vague.

    A Year on the Wing TIM DEE 2009

  • As Hadden and others had predicted, the Odedi proved to be a rather plain, short-winged, chestnut-coloured bush warbler.

    Archive 2006-05-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • Which his father Grangousier seeing, thought they had been lice, and said unto him, What, my dear son, hast thou brought us this far some short-winged hawks of the college of Montague?

    Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

  • Which his father Grangousier seeing, thought they had been lice, and said unto him, What, my dear son, hast thou brought us this far some short-winged hawks of the college of Montague?

    Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

  • There was a small flier parked there, short-winged and graceful, green-backed and white-bellied.

    The Final Reflection John M. Ford 2000

  • Now he pressed both his hands into the soft stuff of the seat and gaped at a small tri-dee on the wall facing him, a miniature scene of life on some other planet wherein a creature enveloped in short black and white striped fur crept belly flat, to stalk long-legged, short-winged birds making blood-red splotches against yellow reed banks under a pale violet sky.

    Star Hunter Andre Norton 1958

  • Set low down under the sphere, with the whitish-gray mass beetling up over them like a curving cliff, were eyes; great, staring, dull things of the type termites have during the short-winged periods of their existences.

    The Raid on the Termites Paul Ernst

  • The former is called a long-winged hawk, or one of the _lure_; the latter, a short-winged hawk, or one of the _fist_.

    The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 12, No. 339, November 8, 1828 Various

  • In front of it several short-winged biplanes are lined up; inside it three or four young men are lolling in wicker chairs.

    Flying for France. With the American Escadrille at Verdun James Rogers 1917

  • What between the wretched diet, the filth, the cold, the crowding, "the short-winged hawks" that the students combed from their hair or shook from their shirts, it is no wonder that many of them fell ill.

    The Age of the Reformation Preserved Smith 1910

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