merganser

Other forms of merganser

plural

mergansers·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about merganser

What does merganser mean?

merganser means "large crested fish-eating diving duck having a slender hooked bill with serrated edges".

How many syllables are in merganser?

merganser has 3 syllables and divides as mer-gan-ser under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for merganser?

Close synonyms include fish duck, sawbill, sheldrake. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is merganser a common word?

merganser is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.