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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
chaffinch
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A robin began to sing, and presently a chaffinch.
▪ In the soft evening light, I retraced my steps back to town, soothed by the songs of blackbirds and chaffinches.
▪ The learning of song in chaffinches takes place in two phases, a memory phase and a practice one.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Chaffinch

Chaffinch \Chaf"finch\, n. [Cf. Chiff-chaff.] (Zo["o]l.) A bird of Europe ( Fringilla c[oe]lebs), having a variety of very sweet songs, and highly valued as a cage bird; -- called also copper finch.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
chaffinch

Fringilla cælebs, Old English ceaffinc, literally "chaff-finch," so called for its habit of eating waste grain among the chaff on farms. See chaff + finch.

Wiktionary
chaffinch

n. A small passerine bird, ''Fringilla coelebs, of the finch family.

WordNet
chaffinch

n. small European finch with a cheerful song [syn: Fringilla coelebs]

Wikipedia
Chaffinch (disambiguation)

Chaffinch is a name applied to some birds in the genus Fringilla and may refer to:

  • Common chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs)
    • La Palma chaffinch (F. c. palmae)
    • Madeiran chaffinch (F. c. maderensis)
  • Gran Canaria blue chaffinch (Fringilla polatzeki)
  • Tenerife blue chaffinch (Fringilla teydea)

Usage examples of "chaffinch".

The chaffinches clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate, permeating and permanent.

Black people who had never been near the Keedsler mansion could imitate the Lyre Bird and the Willy Wagtail of Australia, the Golden Oriole of India, the Nightingale and the Chaffinch and the Wren and the Chiffchaff of England itself.

The Prince wondered for a moment what would happen to the vast carcass of Chaffinch, lifeless on the fields they left behind them.

Gil MacDonald, name your metal machine to me, from which Chaffinch was slain.

Hightower had been disposed of and the subsequent besting of Chaffinch by those irritating outlanders and their machine and weapons, summoned from somewhere by Van Duyn and the hated deCourteney.

Bey has sent his first sally against us, the dragon Chaffinch, and how we have slain him and his corpse is rotting near Erub.

Since the slaying of Chaffinch, many of the Erubites have come to the castle, along with a number of stray horses they recovered.

Bey will summon Chaffinch in Earthfast or some other place far from here and send him against us.

Springbuck was thinking of her story, remembering Chaffinch, a small dragon.

I think you would call it, that Chaffinch is on the order of fifty feet long, nose to tail.

The wind had dropped entirely but the High Street was still littered by the debris the gale had left in its wake, broken twigs, a tiny empty chaffinch nest blown from the crown of a tall tree, here and there a tile from an ancient roof.

Birds - songthrush, chaffinch, great tit, blue tit, jays and many, many more - flew from branch to branch or dived into the undergrowth in search of food.

The ring-dove found hempseed, the chaffinch found millet, the goldfinch found chickweed, the redbreast found worms, the bee found flowers, the fly found infusoria, the grossbeak found flies.

Thom was thrilled by it all - by the tawny owl on a tree branch, who benignly watched their progress, by the young fawn that ate berries from Jennet's hand, and by the song thrush and chaffinch, who alighted on Jennet's shoulders to chirp in her ears and tug at her hair.