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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
blackbird
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Birds, especially blackbirds, like using the fibres for building nests.
▪ But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other?
▪ Darwin noticed that some monogamous birds have very colorful males: mallards, for example, and blackbirds.
▪ Species such as blackbirds and sparrows have three pointing forwards and one pointing back.
▪ The evil spirits ascended from her mouth as a flock of blackbirds.
▪ There were blackbirds and thrushes and skylarks and ravens and starlings and jays and magpies and many kinds of small finches.
▪ When a stuffed owl was presented to experienced blackbirds living in aviaries, they started mobbing the mounted bird.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Blackbird

Blackbird \Black"bird\ (bl[a^]k"b[~e]rd), n. (Zo["o]l.) In England, a species of thrush ( Turdus merula), a singing bird with a fin note; the merle. In America the name is given to several birds, as the Quiscalus versicolor, or crow blackbird; the Agel[ae]us ph[oe]niceus, or red-winged blackbird; the cowbird; the rusty grackle, etc. See Redwing.

Blackbird

Blackbird \Black"bird\, n.

  1. Among slavers and pirates, a negro or Polynesian. [Cant, pejorative]

  2. A native of any of the islands near Queensland; -- called also Kanaka. [Australia, pejorative]

Blackbird

Blackbird \Black"bird\ (bl[a^]k"b[~e]rd), v. i. to engage in the slave trade. [Colloq.]

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
blackbird

late 15c. (late 13c. as a surname), from black (adj.) + bird (n.1). OED says so called for being the only "black" (really dark brown) bird among the songbirds, reflecting an older sense of bird that did not include rooks, crows, ravens.

Wiktionary
blackbird

n. 1 A common true thrush, ''Turdus merula'', found in woods and gardens over much of Eurasia, and introduced elsewhere. 2 A variety of New World birds of the family Icteridae (26 species of icterid bird). 3 (context slang derogatory historical among slavers and pirates English) A native of the South Pacific islands.

WordNet
blackbird
  1. n. any bird of the family Icteridae whose male is black or predominantly black [syn: New World blackbird]

  2. common black European thrush [syn: merl, merle, ouzel, ousel, European blackbird, Turdus merula]

Wikipedia
Blackbird (Beatles song)

"Blackbird" is a song by the Beatles from their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as "the White Album"). The song was written and performed as a solo effort by Paul McCartney, though credited to Lennon–McCartney. McCartney has stated that the lyrics of the song were inspired by the unfortunate state of race relations in the United States in the 1960s.

Blackbird (comics)

The Blackbird (also nicknamed X-Jet) is a fictional aircraft appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The plane is depicted as being used by the superhero team the X-Men. There have been several incarnations of this craft over the years, with Cyclops and Storm as the main pilots.

Blackbird

Blackbird, blackbirds, black bird or black birds may refer to:

Blackbird (journal)

Blackbird is an online journal of literature and the arts based in the United States that posts two issues a year, May 1 and November 1. During the six-month run of an issue, additional content appears as "featured" content. Previous issues are archived online in their entirety.

Blackbird (Omaha leader)

Chief Blackbird (Wash-ing-guhsah-ba) (ca. 1750 – 1800) was the leader of the Omaha Native American Indian tribe who commanded the trade routes used by Spanish, French, British and later American traders until the late 18th century. He was one of the first of the Plains Indian chiefs to trade with white explorers and also believed to be the first of the Plains Indian chiefs to openly question white encroachment. Blackbird used trade as a means to prosperity for his people and as a way to ensure white explorers were aware that they were the guests. The Omaha were not warlike people, yet they were the first on the Great Plains to have mastered equestrianism around 1770 and were at one point, while Chief Blackbird was alive, the most powerful Indian tribe in the Great Plains.

Chief Blackbird died during a smallpox epidemic in 1800. In 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition members were led to Chief Blackbird's burial site, which sits on a bluff on the west side of the Missouri River, in present-day Nebraska.

Blackbird Bend in western Iowa is named for Blackbird.

Blackbird (Alter Bridge album)

Blackbird is the second studio album by rock band Alter Bridge, released on October 9, 2007. The first single, " Rise Today", was released on July 30, 2007. The album peaked at number 13 on the Billboard 200, selling 47,000 copies in its first week on the charts. As of December 2008, Blackbird has sold 227,000 copies. Despite receiving poor marketing and generally low mainstream success, initial critical reception towards the album was mostly positive, with music critics praising the songwriting and musicianship.. The album was certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry.

Blackbird (play)

Blackbird is a play written in 2005 by Scottish playwright David Harrower. It was inspired in part by the crimes of sex offender Toby Studebaker and depicts a young woman meeting a middle-aged man fifteen years after being sexually abused by him when she was twelve.

Blackbird (Alter Bridge song)

"Blackbird" is a song by the American rock band Alter Bridge from their album of the same name, which was released on October 8, 2007, by Universal Republic. At nearly eight minutes long, it is the band's longest song to date. It has received critical acclaim since its release, having often been cited as the crowning point of both the album and the band's career by critics, fans, and the band members themselves. In March 2011, Guitarist magazine listed the song's guitar solo, which is performed by both Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti, as the greatest guitar solo of all time.

Blackbird (band)

Formed by brothers Chip and Tony Kinman after they dissolved their cowpunk band Rank and File, Blackbird were an electronic post-punk band. The Kinman's harmony-enhanced singing was as mellifluous as the vocal sound they had established in Rank and File, while the songwriting structure was pop music-inspired. The pop elements were anchored by a grungy-sounding Yamaha RX-5 drum machine, Tony's throbbing 8th-note bass lines and thickened by Chip's heavily distorted and echo-y guitar lines.

Blackbird marked the third distinct musical style embraced and perpetrated by the Kinmans, first with punk rock ( The Dils), followed by country punk (or cowpunk) with Rank and File, and finally the abrasive, metallic techno-pop of Blackbird.

The band's oeuvre includes three eponymous albums, the first two released by Iloki Records and produced by then- Butthole Surfers sound tech, Ric Wallace. Subsequent releases include the last album (also eponymous) released on Scotti Bros. in 1992; following the third and final full-length release, Iloki Records hired Braindead Soundmachine's Cole Coonce to produce updated versions of songs the brothers had success with in previous bands, "Class War" by The Dils and "Amanda Ruth" by Rank and File.

Blackbird (land yacht)

Land yacht Blackbird
Note that the streamers on the yacht and on the ground point in opposite directions]] [[|

Land yacht Blackbird
More recent version, with fairing to improve performance]]

The Blackbird is an experimental land yacht, built by Rick Cavallaro and John Borton of Sportvision, sponsored by Google and Joby Energy in association with the San Jose State University aeronautics department to demonstrate that it is possible to sail directly downwind faster than the wind. In a test supervised and recognized by the North American Land Sailing Association in July 2010, Cavallaro achieved a speed of in winds: almost three times the speed of the wind.

  1. - Explanation of the Blackbird workings and its physics.↩
Blackbird (memoir)

Blackbird is a memoir by the American journalist and author Jennifer Lauck. Published in October 2000, Blackbird became a New York Times bestseller and was translated into twenty-two languages, making the bestseller lists in London, Ireland and Spain. In this memoir, Lauck conveys the perceptions, thoughts, and emotions of a frightened child in her account of the six years during which both of her parents died. Lauck was given the Book Sense 76 award and was featured in Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Talk, People, Glamour and Writer's Digest. She was a select USA Today pick and nominated for two Oregon Book Awards.

Blackbird is used as a source reference by foster parenting organizations nationwide, providing caregivers with inspiration and insight about taking in parentless children. Blackbird is also used at The Dougy Center, helping children who are grieving the loss of a parent. Lauck has been in collaboration with Yale professors and partners in the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut, Hadar Lubin, MD and David Reed Johnson, Ph. D. Their center routinely gives out copies of Blackbird and Still Waters to patients working to heal childhood trauma.

Blackbird (2012 film)

Blackbird is a 2012 Canadian drama film written and directed by Jason Buxton. The film stars Connor Jessup as a socially isolated and bullied goth teenager who befriends his " puck bunny" classmate ( Alexia Fast), but is falsely accused of plotting a school shooting after he makes a threat against her boyfriend in an online chat session.

Blackbird (online platform)

Blackbird was the codename for an online content authoring platform developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s based on the concept of distributed OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and meant as an alternative to HTML. With scripting capability for HTML yet to be demonstrated, it was to be a means to serve dynamic, media-rich applications and documents that contained processing logic, similar to what a user would experience in a desktop environment. Pages in a "Blackbird application" would be able to contain video, audio, graphs, and other OLE based document formats without the need of plug-ins.

The technology had already been demonstrated in Microsoft's dial-up service at the time, MSN, and plans were in progress to port it to Internet use over a dedicated protocol, but work on the platform was cancelled due to performance problems. Microsoft refocused its efforts on web development around ASP and ActiveX, and the designer was refashioned into Visual InterDev.

The codename was derived from a Cold War era stealth spy plane, the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

Blackbird (2007 film)

Blackbird is a 2007 American drama film. It was adapted from a play written by Adam Rapp.

It played at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It won "Best Narrative Feature" at the Charlotte Film Festival for writers Adam Rapp and Bruce Romans.

Blackbird (violin)

The Blackbird, also called the Black Stone Violin, is a full-size playable violin made of black diabase after drawings by Antonio Stradivari (Stradivarius), but with technical modifications to allow it to be played. The violin was conceived and designed by the Swedish artist Lars Widenfalk. It was named the Blackbird after the common blackbird (Turdus merula) because of its colouring. Stradivari himself often gave his violins names related to birds.

Blackbird (Fat Freddy's Drop album)

Blackbird is the third studio album by the New Zealand group Fat Freddy's Drop, released on 21 June 2013 on their own record label, The Drop. The album was a critical and commercial success, spending 4 weeks at the top of the New Zealand albums chart, and has been certified Platinum.

Blackbird (Dibia novel)

Blackbird is a 2011 novel by Nigerian author Jude Dibia published by the JALAA Writers’ Collective. Dibia’s third novel follows a complex story of romance and revenge set against the social and political climate of contemporary Nigeria, often told through flashbacks and dream sequences.

Blackbird (2014 film)

Blackbird is a 2014 drama film directed by Patrik-Ian Polk and starring Mo'Nique and Isaiah Washington in the lead. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name by Larry Duplechan and was released 24 April 2015. The film had been shown at various film festivals in 2014.

Usage examples of "blackbird".

When the arbutus and myrtle berries are ripe the blackbirds are eagerly hunted, as at that time they are plump and make very savoury and delicate eating.

The night was filled with the croaking of frogs, the cleek, cleek, cleek of the black necked stilt, the zi-zi, zi-zi of cicadas, the choc, choc of the crow blackbirds, and the many other night songs of various wild creatures.

The heavy table was laboriously cast aside, and the men, incongruously bedecked with varied sauces or coyly perched carcasses of roasted blackbird, struggled against each other to get to their feet.

When frost prevents access to food in the east, thrushes and blackbirds move westwards, just as the fieldfares and redwings do.

From the highest boughs of a gingko tree a blackbird whistled three notes.

The blackbirds were singing and my pet blue tits were already scurrying between feeding ground and nest, their beaks stuffed with caterpillars and their feathers growing raggy with the non-stop effort.

There was no longer any interest at Chambery in the watchmaking exile, who had dropped like a cherry-stone from the beak of the blackbird of persecution upon one of the Iles de la Manche.

There were skylarks soaring to heaven, and woodlarks uttering their quiet sweet notes, and blackbirds with their pipes and cymbals.

Accordingly your path was here beguiled with the warbling of a thousand birds, the full-toned blackbird, the mellow thrush, and the pensive nightingale.

A blackbird, whose cheery note suggested melodious memories drawn from the heart of the quiet country, was whistling a lively improvisation on the bough of a chestnut-tree, whereof the brown shining buds were just bursting into leaf,--and Alwyn, whose every sense was pleasantly attuned to the small, as well as great, harmonies of nature, paused for a moment to listen to the luscious piping of the feathered minstrel, that in its own wild woodland way had as excellent an idea of musical variation as any Mozart or Chopin.

He even preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society in the world.

Without any doubt, it would be Violet Bathurst riding over for a little mulled claret and an hour in my bed, and here was I listening out for blackbirds with the one friend whose mind would be tormented by her arrival.

As he spoke a blackbird came running with a chuckle from underneath the berberis, looked at them with alarm, and ran back.

Leaning forward in his chair he reproduced the two white cats from behind him, put the kittens back in their box, caught the blackbird and caged it, and was carefully winding up the hairspring in the white butterfly, when again he fancied that somebody was knocking.

Leaves began to flutter down and to lie yellow upon the orchard grass, where the windfallen apples rotted or were mere shells picked hollow by the blackbirds.