Definition of magpie in English:
magpie
noun ˈmaɡpʌɪˈmæɡˌpaɪ
1A long-tailed crow with boldly marked (or green) plumage and a noisy call.
Family Corvidae: five genera and several species, in particular the black-and-white (black-billed) magpie (Pica pica) of Eurasia and North America
- Chit-chat - keep talking to your baby about what you see and hear as you walk along, anything from the noisy bus to the magpies squabbling in the trees.
- The brain-to-body ratio of crows, ravens and magpies equals that of dolphins and nearly matches humans.
- In learning to escape the vigilance of crows, birds also avoid the attention of some other predators, such as jays and magpies.
- The corvines - crows, rooks, jays, magpies and jackdaws - are relentless stealers of other birds' eggs and chicks.
- Netting unless very well put on the trees prove no good as the clever jackdaw or cheeky magpie can get in with ease in the smallest opening.
- There was the occasional chatter of magpies or jays, and once the bobbing flight of a greater spotted woodpecker.
- The campus, which was once a barren patch of land, was converted into a haven for magpies and robins and blue jays in a short span of 30 years.
- Some kind of magpie was chattering from the cherry trees, sounding like a child's imitation of a machine gun.
- Long-eared Owls usually nest in abandoned stick nests, often the nests of magpies, crows, ravens, or hawks.
- All around the greedy jackjaws, blackbirds, thrushes and magpies eye the ripening fruit and at the exact moment that the fruit ripens they pounce leaving nothing but pips.
- Just 40 metres away was the lynx, sharing its meal with some noisy magpies.
- Mr Fletcher said that a number of people had been caught keeping wild birds, particularly finches and magpies, as pets.
- If we do not get magpies under better control the damage they do to other birds eggs and newly-hatched chicks will continue.
- A pair of long-tailed magpies is building a nest in the trees along the millstream that runs down from the hills and through town.
- Driving through farmland you will come across a variety of wildlife including spur winged plovers, white faced herons, and magpies playing roadside roulette and taunting cyclists.
- There are 113 members of the avian family called Corvidae, or corvids, which includes crows, jackdaws, rooks, ravens, as well as jays, nutcrackers and magpies.
- Like jays and crows, their cousins, magpies are mischievous and bold.
- With the exception of magpies and pigeons, birds are rarely seen in gardens, but the talk included pictures of all kinds of birds in their natural habitats.
- He said the proliferation of Corvids birds like grey crows, magpies and rooks could be directly linked to the decline in songbirds in the area.
- A sudden flash of ebony and ivory caused me to scream shrilly without intention as the bird, a magpie, flew directly at my exposed face!
2Any bird of the Australasian butcher-bird family, having black-and-white plumage and musical calls.
Family Cracticidae: several species
- The Grey Butcherbird, like the magpie, can also be responsible for swooping during Spring in an effort to protect their young.
- For 109 years the Australian magpie has been the Collingwood Football Club's emblem.
- The pair compared data from studies covering 18 different species, including dwarf mongooses, meerkats, Florida scrub jays, western bluebirds, and Australian magpies.
- After the first broadcast, which you recall was on mimicry of Australian magpies.
- But when you get to magpies or butcherbirds the training period becomes longer, so in fact magpies have to learn for about 5 years before they are ready to breed.
3Used figuratively to refer to a person who obsessively collects things or who chatters idly.
his father was a garrulous old man who chattered like a magpieas modifier he would carry these documents home to appease his secretive magpie instinct- In a nursing home herself, with the help of a retired schoolteacher, she rewrote her entire memoir and added it to her massive magpie stack of letters, clippings, essays, and keepsakes.
- The better-known Salsa Celtica also stood out amongst the crop of musical magpies, playing to a jam-packed Fruitmarket and augmenting their Cuban sound with pipes and fiddles following the lead of the brass section and keyboards.
- I managed to avert my eyes in the Christmas decorations section - they're just so sparkly, you see… my magpie tendencies cannot resist.
- Which isn't to say that their music is entirely created by others - but it is a collaborative, magpie process, drawing on the talents of remixers as much as their own restless experiments with samplers and computer programs.
- Such are the artist's magpie tendencies that one of the reasons he chose his flat in Leith was that it afforded him a view of a scrapyard.
- It was Jo Gordon's trademark Dr Who scarves that first aroused the magpie eyes of the UK fashion pack three years ago, sounding the first death knell for the soppy pashmina.
- The things inside came from Rayburn's magpie collection of boxes, art supplies and flea-market treasures, and they were arranged to suggest the way they'd once been stashed in his studio.
- He was the human sampling machine, selling millions of records and drawing degree-level analysis from critics impressed by his magpie eclecticism and arch intelligence.
- This suggests that Scotland's best hope lies in the evolution of a creative magpie cuisine that draws on diverse culinary influences, tempered by the realisation that less is more.
- The Ding Foundation is the squirrel and magpie of the theatre world - collecting and rescuing abandoned objects, and all the debris and detritus of other people's lives, and animating them in order to tell stories.
- Yet if Paolozzi's work was the result of the brilliant deconstructions and recontextualisations of a magpie mind, at its heart lay simple draughtsmanship, a natural engagement with beauty.
- For the rest of his long, innovative and hugely prolific career, he drew inspiration from the comics, novelties, magazines, toys and cheap novelettes collected over the years with magpie insatiability.
- Together, they form a visual diary of his trips, containing thousands of photographs, ephemera, pages from magazines and newspapers - anything that catches Galliano's magpie eye.
- They are very far from being traditional; they are magpie collectors of everything that might suit them, and that includes rhetoric.
- The colourful packaging, all purples and pinks, should appeal to your magpie tendencies, while the actual products - eau de toilette, bath crystals and more - will not disappoint.
- English prides itself on being the magpie language, freely picking up foreign words to incorporate into its flexible vocabulary.
- While clearly inspired by a Romantic sensibility, he is never quite free from the bonds of his precise, inquiring, magpie mind.
- The exquisite but inexpensive jewellery acts like a magnet to magpie wives and their pleased husbands who can finally afford ‘something really nice’ in the cheap displays.
- The Eameses were magpie collectors of Americana - toys, tools, quilts, cotton reels, primitive paintings - and this love affair shines through their short films.
- We are living in a society based on the concept of ownership; a magpie culture.
4The division of a circular target next to the outer one, or a shot which strikes this.
- The target was white with a black bull's-eye (counting 5 points) and two rings, invisible to the firer, called the "inner" and the "magpie," and scoring 4 and 3; the rest of the target was called the "outer" and counted points.
- This system was the basis of all match shooting, whether with match or service rifles, and (with the trifling difference that the bull counted 4, the inner 3 and the magpie and outer alike 2) it was followed in military range practice.
Origin
Late 16th century: probably shortening of dialect maggot the pie, maggoty-pie, from Magot (Middle English pet form of the given name Marguerite) + pie2.
Definition of magpie in US English:
magpie
nounˈmaɡˌpīˈmæɡˌpaɪ
1A long-tailed crow with boldly marked (or green) plumage and a raucous voice.
Family Corvidae: five genera and several species, in particular the black-and-white (black-billed) magpie (Pica pica) of Eurasia and North America
- Chit-chat - keep talking to your baby about what you see and hear as you walk along, anything from the noisy bus to the magpies squabbling in the trees.
- A sudden flash of ebony and ivory caused me to scream shrilly without intention as the bird, a magpie, flew directly at my exposed face!
- He said the proliferation of Corvids birds like grey crows, magpies and rooks could be directly linked to the decline in songbirds in the area.
- Like jays and crows, their cousins, magpies are mischievous and bold.
- With the exception of magpies and pigeons, birds are rarely seen in gardens, but the talk included pictures of all kinds of birds in their natural habitats.
- The campus, which was once a barren patch of land, was converted into a haven for magpies and robins and blue jays in a short span of 30 years.
- Netting unless very well put on the trees prove no good as the clever jackdaw or cheeky magpie can get in with ease in the smallest opening.
- All around the greedy jackjaws, blackbirds, thrushes and magpies eye the ripening fruit and at the exact moment that the fruit ripens they pounce leaving nothing but pips.
- Long-eared Owls usually nest in abandoned stick nests, often the nests of magpies, crows, ravens, or hawks.
- The corvines - crows, rooks, jays, magpies and jackdaws - are relentless stealers of other birds' eggs and chicks.
- If we do not get magpies under better control the damage they do to other birds eggs and newly-hatched chicks will continue.
- A pair of long-tailed magpies is building a nest in the trees along the millstream that runs down from the hills and through town.
- Mr Fletcher said that a number of people had been caught keeping wild birds, particularly finches and magpies, as pets.
- Some kind of magpie was chattering from the cherry trees, sounding like a child's imitation of a machine gun.
- Just 40 metres away was the lynx, sharing its meal with some noisy magpies.
- In learning to escape the vigilance of crows, birds also avoid the attention of some other predators, such as jays and magpies.
- There are 113 members of the avian family called Corvidae, or corvids, which includes crows, jackdaws, rooks, ravens, as well as jays, nutcrackers and magpies.
- There was the occasional chatter of magpies or jays, and once the bobbing flight of a greater spotted woodpecker.
- Driving through farmland you will come across a variety of wildlife including spur winged plovers, white faced herons, and magpies playing roadside roulette and taunting cyclists.
- The brain-to-body ratio of crows, ravens and magpies equals that of dolphins and nearly matches humans.
2Used in similes or comparisons to refer to a person who collects things, especially things of little use or value, or a person who chatters idly.
his father was a garrulous old man who chattered like a magpieas modifier he would carry these documents home to appease his secretive magpie instinct- The things inside came from Rayburn's magpie collection of boxes, art supplies and flea-market treasures, and they were arranged to suggest the way they'd once been stashed in his studio.
- English prides itself on being the magpie language, freely picking up foreign words to incorporate into its flexible vocabulary.
- We are living in a society based on the concept of ownership; a magpie culture.
- Yet if Paolozzi's work was the result of the brilliant deconstructions and recontextualisations of a magpie mind, at its heart lay simple draughtsmanship, a natural engagement with beauty.
- The colourful packaging, all purples and pinks, should appeal to your magpie tendencies, while the actual products - eau de toilette, bath crystals and more - will not disappoint.
- They are very far from being traditional; they are magpie collectors of everything that might suit them, and that includes rhetoric.
- It was Jo Gordon's trademark Dr Who scarves that first aroused the magpie eyes of the UK fashion pack three years ago, sounding the first death knell for the soppy pashmina.
- Together, they form a visual diary of his trips, containing thousands of photographs, ephemera, pages from magazines and newspapers - anything that catches Galliano's magpie eye.
- He was the human sampling machine, selling millions of records and drawing degree-level analysis from critics impressed by his magpie eclecticism and arch intelligence.
- Which isn't to say that their music is entirely created by others - but it is a collaborative, magpie process, drawing on the talents of remixers as much as their own restless experiments with samplers and computer programs.
- The Eameses were magpie collectors of Americana - toys, tools, quilts, cotton reels, primitive paintings - and this love affair shines through their short films.
- For the rest of his long, innovative and hugely prolific career, he drew inspiration from the comics, novelties, magazines, toys and cheap novelettes collected over the years with magpie insatiability.
- I managed to avert my eyes in the Christmas decorations section - they're just so sparkly, you see… my magpie tendencies cannot resist.
- Such are the artist's magpie tendencies that one of the reasons he chose his flat in Leith was that it afforded him a view of a scrapyard.
- The Ding Foundation is the squirrel and magpie of the theatre world - collecting and rescuing abandoned objects, and all the debris and detritus of other people's lives, and animating them in order to tell stories.
- The better-known Salsa Celtica also stood out amongst the crop of musical magpies, playing to a jam-packed Fruitmarket and augmenting their Cuban sound with pipes and fiddles following the lead of the brass section and keyboards.
- This suggests that Scotland's best hope lies in the evolution of a creative magpie cuisine that draws on diverse culinary influences, tempered by the realisation that less is more.
- While clearly inspired by a Romantic sensibility, he is never quite free from the bonds of his precise, inquiring, magpie mind.
- The exquisite but inexpensive jewellery acts like a magnet to magpie wives and their pleased husbands who can finally afford ‘something really nice’ in the cheap displays.
- In a nursing home herself, with the help of a retired schoolteacher, she rewrote her entire memoir and added it to her massive magpie stack of letters, clippings, essays, and keepsakes.
Origin
Late 16th century: probably shortening of dialect maggot the pie, maggoty-pie, from Magot ( Middle English pet form of the given name Marguerite) + pie.