meleagrine

English

WOTD – 22 November 2012

Etymology

From Latin meleagris (“turkey”) +‎ -ine

Pronunciation

(US) IPA^(key): /ˌmɛl.iˈeɪ.ɡɹaɪn/

Adjective

meleagrine (not comparable)

(zoology) Of or pertaining to the genus Meleagris, including turkeys.
- 1914, Edward A. McIlhenny, The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting, Doubleday (1914), page 39:
  Having disposed of such records as we have of the extinct ancestors of the American turkeys — the so-to-speak meleagrine records — we can now pass to what is, comparatively speaking, the modern history of these famous birds, although some of this history is already several centuries old.
- 2003, United States Patents Quarterly, Volume 65, page 1968:
  To use the district court's meleagrine analogy, one may add an additional step to the recipe: "continuing to cook the turkey until the skin is burned to a crisp."
- 2005, "Henpecking is not the solution", The Berkshire Eagle, 11 October 2005:
  The sad incident with the turkeys is hardly the first case of an improper response to wild animals that have wandered out of their natural habitat. […] Perhaps this aquiline newspaper would like to memorialize its late meleagrine friends by publishing posters or essays from Berkshire schoolchildren and scout troops.

Translations

of or pertaining to the genus Meleagris

Finnish: kalkkuna- (fi), kalkkunansukuinen

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for meleagrine in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)