passerine

1. 1.

   relating to or characteristic of the passeriform birds

   Antonymsnonpasserine

Other forms of passerine

plural

passerines·

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 passerine

What does passerine mean?

passerine means "perching birds mostly small and living near the ground with feet having 4 toes arranged to allow for gripping the perch; most are songbirds; hatchlings are helpless". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in passerine?

passerine has 3 syllables and divides as pas-se-rine 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 passerine?

Close synonyms include passeriform bird. 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.

What is the opposite of passerine?

The recorded antonyms are nonpasserine.

Is passerine a common word?

passerine 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.