Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various large wading birds of the family Ciconiidae, having long legs and a long straight bill.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A large altricial grallatorial bird, of the family Ciconiidæ and especially of the subfamily Ciconiinæ (which see for technical characters).

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) Any one of several species of large wading birds of the family Ciconidæ, having long legs and a long, pointed bill. They are found both in the Old World and in America, and belong to Ciconia and several allied genera. The European white stork (Ciconia alba) is the best known. It commonly makes its nests on the top of a building, a chimney, a church spire, or a pillar. The black stork (C. nigra) is native of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
  • noun the East Indian jabiru.
  • noun the smaller adjutant of India (Leptoptilos Javanica).
  • noun the adjutant.
  • noun See Marabou. -- Saddle-billed stork, the African jabiru. See Jabiru.
  • noun (Bot.) any plant of the genus Pelargonium; -- so called in allusion to the beaklike prolongation of the axis of the receptacle of its flower. See Pelargonium.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A large wading bird with long legs and a long beak of the family Ciconiidae.

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

  • noun large mostly Old World wading birds typically having white-and-black plumage

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English storc; see ster- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English stork, from Old English storc, from Proto-Germanic *sturkaz, from Proto-Indo-European *str̥gos, probably an extension of *ster- (“stiff”) (from its movements). Near cognates include German Storch and Icelandic storkur, Albanian shturë ("starling").

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Examples

  • In Denmark, however, the stork is not a welcome guest and so this would be considered appropriate alternative housing.

    Boing Boing 2009

  • Sue Dickenson's comment about the stork is priceless.

    Dumbest quote David 2008

  • There's food in the bucket, because he loves food so much, and … he keeps his food in the basement, and he's coming up to answer the door because the stork is knocking at it and beseeching him to be a hero.

    Sound Off: Kung Fu Panda - What Did You Think? « FirstShowing.net 2008

  • The stork is particularly mentioned; the fir-trees, which are very high, are her house, her castle.

    Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume III (Job to Song of Solomon) 1721

  • Great pics the pic of the coon's uh um calling the stork, was hilarious.

    Reader Shots: New Photos of the Week 2009

  • Great pics the pic of the coon's uh um calling the stork, was hilarious.

    Reader Shots: New Photos of the Week 2009

  • Garret knew Ross would be coming through the door shortly, so he apologized for such a brief meeting and promised to call the stork early next week.

    Act of Treason Vince Flynn 2006

  • Garret knew Ross would be coming through the door shortly, so he apologized for such a brief meeting and promised to call the stork early next week.

    Act of Treason Vince Flynn 2006

  • The stork was a Baptist who attended church every Sunday, which in a state like Indiana was very important.

    Act of Treason Vince Flynn 2006

  • The stork was a Baptist who attended church every Sunday, which in a state like Indiana was very important.

    Act of Treason Vince Flynn 2006

Comments

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  • In Western culture the White Stork is a symbol of childbirth. In Victorian times the details of human reproduction were difficult to approach, especially in reply to a younger child's query of "Where did I come from?"; "The stork brought you to us" was the tactic used to avoid discussion of sex. This habit was derived from the once popular superstition that storks were the harbingers of happiness and prosperity, and possibly from the habit of some storks of nesting atop chimneys, down which the new baby could be imagined as entering the house.

    The image of a stork bearing an infant wrapped in a sling held in its beak is common in popular culture. The small pink or reddish patches often found on a newborn child's eyelids, between the eyes, on the upper lip, and on the nape of the neck are sometimes still called "stork bites". In reality they are clusters of developing veins that soon fade.

    _Wikipedia

    February 10, 2008

  • "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."

    - Mae West.

    October 5, 2008

  • WORD: stork

    DEFINITION:

    (1) ' n. A large wading bird with long legs and a long beak of the family Ciconiidae. ' -- Wiktionary

    (2) ' According to European folklore, the stork is responsible for bringing babies to new parents. The legend is very ancient, but was popularised by a 19th-century Hans Christian Andersen story called The Storks. ' -- Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Stork#Storks_and_childbirth

    EXAMPLE:

    ' Harry's wife, Grace, was stretched out on a chaise longue . . . She was smoking a small cigar in a long holder made from the legbone of a stork. A stork was a large European bird, about half the size of a Bermuda Ern. Children who wanted to know where babies came from were sometimes told that they were brought by storks. People who told their children such a thing felt that their children were too young to think intelligently about sex.

    ' And there were actually pictures of storks delivering babies on birth announcements and in cartoons and so on, for children to see . . .

    ' Dwayne Hoover and Harry LeSabre saw pictures like that when they were very little boys. They believed them, too. '

    -- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions -- Chapter 15 (pages 162 - 163).

    CITATION:

    1973 KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday

    August 28, 2013

  • What do you know, the "a href" tag works in Wordnik comments.

    But in the definition I provided below, I forgot to include the "www." prefix.

    Correcting for that now:

    (2) ' According to European folklore, the stork is responsible for bringing babies to new parents. The legend is very ancient, but was popularised by a 19th-century Hans Christian Andersen story called The Storks. ' -- Wikipedia -- www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Stork#Storks_and_childbirth

    August 28, 2013