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SQUIRREL
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A kind of arboreal rodent having a long bushy tail
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("squirrel" is a kind of...):
gnawer; rodent (relatively small placental mammals having a single pair of constantly growing incisor teeth specialized for gnawing)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "squirrel"):
tree squirrel (any typical arboreal squirrel)
gopher; ground squirrel; spermophile (any of various terrestrial burrowing rodents of Old and New Worlds; often destroy crops)
eastern chipmunk; ground squirrel; hackee; striped squirrel; Tamias striatus (small striped semiterrestrial eastern American squirrel with cheek pouches)
chipmunk (a burrowing ground squirrel of western America and Asia; has cheek pouches and a light and dark stripe running down the body)
baranduki; baronduki; barunduki; burunduki; Eutamius asiaticus; Eutamius sibiricus (terrestrial Siberian squirrel)
American flying squirrel (New World flying squirrels)
Asiatic flying squirrel (nocturnal rodent of Asia having furry folds of skin between forelegs and hind legs enabling it to move by gliding leaps)
Holonyms ("squirrel" is a member of...):
family Sciuridae; Sciuridae (a mammal family of true squirrels including: ground squirrels; marmots; chipmunks; flying squirrels; spermophiles)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The fur of a squirrel
Classified under:
Hypernyms ("squirrel" is a kind of...):
fur; pelt (the dressed hairy coat of a mammal)
Context examples:
They climbed high trees as nimbly as a squirrel, for they had strong extended claws before and behind, terminating in sharp points, and hooked.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Successful as he was with squirrels, there was one difficulty that prevented him from living and growing fat on them.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
How the squirrel’s tissues adapt to the cold and metabolic stress has confounded researchers.
(Researchers develop “hibernation in a dish” to study how animals adapt to the cold, National Institutes of Health)
Squirrels were busy with their small harvesting.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
He remarked the pregnant silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in hiding.
(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)
Recently, researchers found that a cellular process called SUMOylation goes into overdrive in a certain species of ground squirrel during hibernation.
(Hibernating ground squirrels provide clues to new stroke treatments, National Institutes of Health)
“It is a lucky thing,” said he, “that they did not tear up the tree on which I was sitting, or I should have had to sprint on to another like a squirrel; but we tailors are nimble.”
(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)
He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
They took cells from a newborn ground squirrel and reprogrammed them to become stem cells, which are undifferentiated cells capable of becoming any type of tissue in the body.
(Researchers develop “hibernation in a dish” to study how animals adapt to the cold, National Institutes of Health)
Like a squirrel.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
