beak1
noun biːkbik
1A bird's horny projecting jaws; a bill.
a parent bird with a caterpillar in its beak- Whether the flightless birds used their beaks to impale or bludgeon their prey is unknown, Chiappe says.
- Unfortunately for some, they bolt right into the beaks of waiting birds.
- As a trombone player pulls in the slide to make a higher frequency sound by reducing the volume of the tube, so does a bird open its beak and pull back its head to reduce the volume of its vocal tract.
- Climbers had to climb the sharp cliffs in strong winds and fend of birds attacking with beaks and wings.
- Samshuddin says he watches out for the shape of a bird's tail, beak, nostrils and eyes, all of which have a bearing on singing quality.
- By rapidly opening and closing its beak a bird can alter the damping characteristics of the vocal tract.
- These birds have heavy beaks with a distinct hook at the end.
- Birds use their beaks to keep their feathers in order; you know this action as preening.
- Sandhill Cranes are big birds, with long legs and necks, long pointed beaks, and wingspans which can be over six feet.
- Instead of having teeth, birds have developed beaks.
- When a tui or a bellbird pops open a bud, all four petals spring back, and as the bird inserts its beak into the corolla to drink nectar, its head often brushes pollen onto the receptive stigma.
- Using its beak, the bird reached for a bud and gave it a quick twist, which released the four petals.
- The birds all had black beaks, a sensitive external indicator of the absence of T in the plasma of starlings.
- Many birds, beaks open, swim in Lines toward the shore, some beating their large wings against the water's surface to drive their prey into the shallows.
- Accipitrids are diurnal birds of prey with broad wings, hooked beaks, strong legs and feet and sharp talons.
- New research suggests that as testosterone in male birds increases, so does the level of carotenoids, the chemicals that create the bright coloring on birds' feathers, beaks, and legs.
- The plant's seeds are thought to be distributed, in part, by bird beaks, feet, and digestive systems.
- There are now 500 of these large, blue-black birds with yellow beaks and feet, in the centre.
- For example, in some species of woodpecker, the male and female birds have differently shaped beaks, which allows a pair to more efficiently mine a tree for food.
- The differences between the bills of male and female purple-throats make it hard not to draw parallels to another group of birds with amazingly variable beaks, Darwin's finches.
bill, nib, mandibleScottish & Northern English neb- 1.1 The horny projecting jaw of animals other than birds, for example a turtle or squid.
- They are characterized by a short snout and the loss of almost all their teeth, which were replaced by a turtle-like beak used for cropping vegetation.
- Over the years whalers have reported finding a high number of large squid beaks in the mammals' stomachs, pegging sperm whales as primary predators of large squid.
- Giant squid beaks in the stomach of sperm whales are believed to be one of the prime sources for ambergris, a valuable substance used in making perfume.
- It has a larger beak than the giant squid and has hooks on its tentacles.
- The whalers often discovered giant squid beaks inside the stomachs of these whales.
- It is hard to know whether towing a diver a short distance does any harm to a suitably sized turtle, but I heard from one of my very warmwater Leaks some years ago of a diver losing a finger to the beak of a big, quick-headed turtle.
- This is enough for Susanna, and she raises her hand gently to halt the turtle and avoid any possible clash between beak and mask.
- The upper and the lower jaws were certainly covered with horny beaks in life, like the beak in turtles and, it can be assumed, in the Triassic rhynchosaurs.
- Contents of the gizzards were separated into otoliths and squid beaks.
- The big grey animals with sickle-shaped dorsal fins and prominent beaks are bottlenose dolphins (immortalised by Flipper).
- The tropical animals had longer beaks and a different color patterning on the head; their calves had white rather than dark flanks.
- This squid has one of the largest beaks known of any squid and also has unique swivelling hooks on the clubs at the ends of its tentacles.
- You can eat everything on a squid but the beak, shell, and eyes.
- Just above the squid's eyes is a hard ball, called the beak, which creates a slight bulge.
- 1.2informal A person's nose.she can't wait to stick her beak in
- She was also lucky she didn't have daddy's beak nose that Mauve had.
- Fielding is something beautiful too: crow's beak for a nose, rock star hair, but that of a girl rock star; he could be the great, lost fifth member of The Runaways.
- His nose is still the defiant beak it was when I first met him, when we were both thirteen and bullied at a new and ghastly school.
- A more contemporary critical reading of The Nose leads us to Pinocchio, whose own beak was known to grow in proportion to the telling of tall tales.
- The whole group of servants tried to stifle their giggles but Aimée's mother turned and shot an evil glare at them over her beak of a nose.
- Do the inhabitants of North Korean gulags take comfort that the hegemonic monster of US imperialism is unable to stick its beak into the criminal justice system they were sentenced under.
- Yesterday, on the Edgware Road, I saw an elderly man with an impressive beak of a nose.
- Wolfen felt the man would stick out in a crowd like a sore thumb, with his long beak of a nose.
- Cyril has stuck his beak in controversy throughout his career.
- I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot.
- The vicious girlfriends are smart enough to realize how terribly they've behaved, but their solution is simply to stick their beaks into Kate's affairs again.
- Heavy brows converge into a huge beak of a nose which hovers over thick lips smothered by a huge moustache.
- A jutting beak of a nose, sharp chin and deep-set eyes gave him the appearance of a living skull.
- If there are areas that this Government needs to stick its nosy beak into, maybe it should focus on those areas, because many of those people are its own core members.
- 1.3 A projection at the prow of an ancient warship, typically shaped to resemble the head of a bird or other animal, used to pierce the hulls of enemy ships.
- The designs on Bronze Age metalwork and rock carvings show boats with a beak at the prow.
- The Eagle then hit a docked hydrofoil, cracking the beak of its wooden figurehead.
- The corvus crashed downward, its beak driving into the other ship's deck, whereupon Roman infantry dashed across.
- The main weapon for ramming into enemy ships was the beak of the ship.
- ‘Heads’ was the name given to that part of sailing ships forward of the forecastle and around the beak which was used by the crew as their lavatory.
Derivatives
beaked
- in combination a yellow-beaked alpine chough
- Eagle-eyed residents have been craning their necks skyward to catch a glimpse of the beaked bandit but, so far, to no avail.
- Of those groups only the higher Dicynodontia were to be successful, and in fact these stocky, toothless and beaked animals remained the dominant terrestrial herbivores right up until the Carnian epoch (Late Triassic period).
- Many species will specialize on certain types of seeds; small beaked sparrows eat small seeds, large beaked sparrows eat large seeds.
- Flower buds of the native forest trees, however, open in a progression over a six-month span, starting in April with poplars, willows, alders, and beaked hazel and ending in October with witch hazel.
- Slowly its two tentacles appear, stretching almost lazily toward a shrimp until, with staggering speed, they shoot out to their full extent and grab the prey, pulling it back into a beaked mouth.
- Additionally, for the students, the potential stress of working with a new material or in a new technique is counterbalanced by the undiluted fun of trying to create a beaked bull or a jewel-encrusted woodpecker.
- In addition, black oak, pignut hickory, white pine, and beaked hazelnut each contributed at least 5% importance to the community type.
- This critically acclaimed slice of beaked life chronicles the fall and rise of Mark Bittner, a homeless San Franciscan who wrote a bestseller about the flock of talking birds that changed his life.
- Watching thousands of these beaked, black-and-white sea birds as they convoy together and travel across blinding white landscapes might come across as a boring, repetitive sight.
- Even this beaked bird, with even more direct evidence of feathers, is ‘dated’ to 135 million years, so older than its ‘feathered dinosaur’ ancestor.
- The ornithomimids' beaked jaws were probably weak; it is thought that they may have been omnivorous, eating small animals and maybe some plant material.
- Common in the understory are chokecherry, beaked hazelnut, a wild rose, red baneberry, thimbleberry, and bracken.
- Scattered here and there are isolated beaked skulls with testicles in the eye sockets and a penis rising from the forehead like a unicorn horn.
- It would stand at least four meters tall, if it had enough room to stand comfortably in, its leathery gray skin was covered in patches of chitin, and its mouth was beaked.
- The large beaked nose framed by drooping shaggy eyebrows emphasizes his ethnicity.
- A dark shadow was cast in front of them in the shape of a large, beaked, winged animal.
- In the earliest known post-Tapinocephalus Zone fauna of southern Africa (where the fossil record for late Permian tetrapods is most complete), new groups of big herbivores - the beaked and toothless dicynodonts - appear.
- Mayor researched paleontological finds in the Gobi and discovered that some of the most abundant fossils there belong to Protocerotops, a beaked dinosaur.
beak-like
- They butt the coral with their massive heads and smash off parts, crunching it up with giant front teeth fused into a beak-like weapon that's perfect for the job.
- The larvae began to devour the exoskeletal remains of their previous existence with a beak-like mouth extending from the first segment of their worm-like body.
- Distinction is added by the beak-like profile of Addlebrough to the east.
- Avicularia are small heterozooids in which the zooecium and operculum form a beak-like, snapping structure that deters small predators.
- The dromaesaur had a long, beak-like snout; small widely spaced teeth; and a long tail.
- Scarids have fused beak-like jaws which they use to graze on algae.
- About the size of a very large chicken, it had a long neck and tail and a peculiar thin, beak-like snout lined with small and widely spaced teeth.
- The front of the skull and the lower jaw were narrow and beak-like.
- The three specimens showing the upper jaw all show a beak-like anterior end of the structure.
- Winged creatures borne of nightmares circled above them like vultures, snapping their beak-like mouths.
- The mask has a beak-like nose and seems to be smiling, unlike most of the other heads and masks.
- Modern monotremes lack teeth as adults; sutures are hard to see; the rostrum is elongate, beak-like, and covered by a leathery sheath; and lacrimal bones are absent.
- He was gaunt and extremely pale, with parched lips and a beak-like nose.
- Once the prey is snared it is bitten with strong beak-like jaws and pulled into the mouth by the radula.
- S. vetula have teeth that form beak-like plates, similar to parrots.
- Perennial geraniums or cranebills are so named because of the beak-like fruits that appear after flowering.
- These differences suggest that they developed in parallel from ancestors with projecting beak-like feeding structures similar to that found in Colpodella.
- It is believed that they captured prey with their retractable tentacles and passed it to their mouth where a beak-like jaw tore it into pieces.
- Parrotfishes are characterized by their distinctive beak-like jaws, in which the teeth are fused together in most species, and a pharyngeal apparatus, which acts as a second set of jaws in the throat.
- Although they lack teeth, sea turtles have a beak-like jaw with a sharp cutting edge.
adjective biːktbikt
adjective
Origin
Middle English: from Old French bec, from Latin beccus, of Celtic origin.
Rhymes
antique, batik, bespeak, bezique, bleak, boutique, cacique, caïque, cheek, chic, clique, creak, creek, critique, Dominique, eke, freak, geek, Greek, hide-and-seek, keek, Lalique, leak, leek, Martinique, meek, midweek, Mozambique, Mustique, mystique, oblique, opéra comique, ortanique, peak, Peake, peek, physique, pique, pratique, reek, seek, shriek, Sikh, sleek, sneak, speak, Speke, squeak, streak, teak, technique, tongue-in-cheek, tweak, unique, veronique, weak, week, wreak
beak2
noun biːkbik
British informal A magistrate or a schoolmaster.
- He lives under Newham Council's jurisdiction, so credit to the council for taking Thames Water to task and getting them before the beak.
- He is up before the ERC beak tomorrow and, if found guilty, is likely to be suspended for at least a month.
- In order to help out I moved from the fines court to the Magistrates Court next door and went up before the beak, or beakess on this occasion.
- Presumably you would have to be hauled before the beak and convicted of something before your licence was revoked.
- Having been up in front of the beaks myself on suspicion of failing to obtain the best possible placing, I'm not about to start a campaign for real jockeys to be carpeted for being beaten in races they should have won.
- But the union beaks decreed that because the league regulations were drawn up under English legal guidelines, they had the right to ‘prosecute’ the player under their own procedure.
- If I ever find myself up in front of the beak (presumably on a charge of teenage arson) I'd like this guy to defend me.
- And those sent down will be told by the beak: ‘I have no choice but to deliberately de-liberate you.’
- McLean resigned as a director of the club on Thursday, a move which spares him an appearance before the beaks at Hampden as he has still to be held to account for an incident involving a BBC reporter.
- That seems a good point to me, particularly in views of recent court cases where greengrocers were up before the beaks just because they sold fruit and veg in pounds when legislation now rules that goods must be sold in metric units.
Origin
Late 18th century: probably from criminals' slang.
beak1
nounbikbēk
1A bird's horny projecting jaws; a bill.
- Many birds, beaks open, swim in Lines toward the shore, some beating their large wings against the water's surface to drive their prey into the shallows.
- When a tui or a bellbird pops open a bud, all four petals spring back, and as the bird inserts its beak into the corolla to drink nectar, its head often brushes pollen onto the receptive stigma.
- Birds use their beaks to keep their feathers in order; you know this action as preening.
- Using its beak, the bird reached for a bud and gave it a quick twist, which released the four petals.
- Accipitrids are diurnal birds of prey with broad wings, hooked beaks, strong legs and feet and sharp talons.
- New research suggests that as testosterone in male birds increases, so does the level of carotenoids, the chemicals that create the bright coloring on birds' feathers, beaks, and legs.
- As a trombone player pulls in the slide to make a higher frequency sound by reducing the volume of the tube, so does a bird open its beak and pull back its head to reduce the volume of its vocal tract.
- Unfortunately for some, they bolt right into the beaks of waiting birds.
- Samshuddin says he watches out for the shape of a bird's tail, beak, nostrils and eyes, all of which have a bearing on singing quality.
- Whether the flightless birds used their beaks to impale or bludgeon their prey is unknown, Chiappe says.
- Sandhill Cranes are big birds, with long legs and necks, long pointed beaks, and wingspans which can be over six feet.
- The plant's seeds are thought to be distributed, in part, by bird beaks, feet, and digestive systems.
- For example, in some species of woodpecker, the male and female birds have differently shaped beaks, which allows a pair to more efficiently mine a tree for food.
- By rapidly opening and closing its beak a bird can alter the damping characteristics of the vocal tract.
- Climbers had to climb the sharp cliffs in strong winds and fend of birds attacking with beaks and wings.
- The birds all had black beaks, a sensitive external indicator of the absence of T in the plasma of starlings.
- The differences between the bills of male and female purple-throats make it hard not to draw parallels to another group of birds with amazingly variable beaks, Darwin's finches.
- Instead of having teeth, birds have developed beaks.
- These birds have heavy beaks with a distinct hook at the end.
- There are now 500 of these large, blue-black birds with yellow beaks and feet, in the centre.
bill, nib, mandible- 1.1 The horny projecting jaw of animals other than birds, for example a turtle or squid.
- The upper and the lower jaws were certainly covered with horny beaks in life, like the beak in turtles and, it can be assumed, in the Triassic rhynchosaurs.
- You can eat everything on a squid but the beak, shell, and eyes.
- Contents of the gizzards were separated into otoliths and squid beaks.
- It has a larger beak than the giant squid and has hooks on its tentacles.
- Giant squid beaks in the stomach of sperm whales are believed to be one of the prime sources for ambergris, a valuable substance used in making perfume.
- The tropical animals had longer beaks and a different color patterning on the head; their calves had white rather than dark flanks.
- This squid has one of the largest beaks known of any squid and also has unique swivelling hooks on the clubs at the ends of its tentacles.
- Over the years whalers have reported finding a high number of large squid beaks in the mammals' stomachs, pegging sperm whales as primary predators of large squid.
- The whalers often discovered giant squid beaks inside the stomachs of these whales.
- This is enough for Susanna, and she raises her hand gently to halt the turtle and avoid any possible clash between beak and mask.
- It is hard to know whether towing a diver a short distance does any harm to a suitably sized turtle, but I heard from one of my very warmwater Leaks some years ago of a diver losing a finger to the beak of a big, quick-headed turtle.
- Just above the squid's eyes is a hard ball, called the beak, which creates a slight bulge.
- They are characterized by a short snout and the loss of almost all their teeth, which were replaced by a turtle-like beak used for cropping vegetation.
- The big grey animals with sickle-shaped dorsal fins and prominent beaks are bottlenose dolphins (immortalised by Flipper).
- 1.2informal A person's nose, especially a hooked one.she can't wait to stick her beak in
- Wolfen felt the man would stick out in a crowd like a sore thumb, with his long beak of a nose.
- If there are areas that this Government needs to stick its nosy beak into, maybe it should focus on those areas, because many of those people are its own core members.
- Heavy brows converge into a huge beak of a nose which hovers over thick lips smothered by a huge moustache.
- I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot.
- The whole group of servants tried to stifle their giggles but Aimée's mother turned and shot an evil glare at them over her beak of a nose.
- Do the inhabitants of North Korean gulags take comfort that the hegemonic monster of US imperialism is unable to stick its beak into the criminal justice system they were sentenced under.
- She was also lucky she didn't have daddy's beak nose that Mauve had.
- Cyril has stuck his beak in controversy throughout his career.
- A more contemporary critical reading of The Nose leads us to Pinocchio, whose own beak was known to grow in proportion to the telling of tall tales.
- The vicious girlfriends are smart enough to realize how terribly they've behaved, but their solution is simply to stick their beaks into Kate's affairs again.
- Fielding is something beautiful too: crow's beak for a nose, rock star hair, but that of a girl rock star; he could be the great, lost fifth member of The Runaways.
- A jutting beak of a nose, sharp chin and deep-set eyes gave him the appearance of a living skull.
- Yesterday, on the Edgware Road, I saw an elderly man with an impressive beak of a nose.
- His nose is still the defiant beak it was when I first met him, when we were both thirteen and bullied at a new and ghastly school.
- 1.3 A projection at the prow of an ancient warship, typically shaped to resemble the head of a bird or other animal, used to pierce the hulls of enemy ships.
- The main weapon for ramming into enemy ships was the beak of the ship.
- The Eagle then hit a docked hydrofoil, cracking the beak of its wooden figurehead.
- The designs on Bronze Age metalwork and rock carvings show boats with a beak at the prow.
- ‘Heads’ was the name given to that part of sailing ships forward of the forecastle and around the beak which was used by the crew as their lavatory.
- The corvus crashed downward, its beak driving into the other ship's deck, whereupon Roman infantry dashed across.
Origin
Middle English: from Old French bec, from Latin beccus, of Celtic origin.
beak2
nounbikbēk
British informal A magistrate or a schoolmaster.
- But the union beaks decreed that because the league regulations were drawn up under English legal guidelines, they had the right to ‘prosecute’ the player under their own procedure.
- Presumably you would have to be hauled before the beak and convicted of something before your licence was revoked.
- That seems a good point to me, particularly in views of recent court cases where greengrocers were up before the beaks just because they sold fruit and veg in pounds when legislation now rules that goods must be sold in metric units.
- Having been up in front of the beaks myself on suspicion of failing to obtain the best possible placing, I'm not about to start a campaign for real jockeys to be carpeted for being beaten in races they should have won.
- In order to help out I moved from the fines court to the Magistrates Court next door and went up before the beak, or beakess on this occasion.
- He lives under Newham Council's jurisdiction, so credit to the council for taking Thames Water to task and getting them before the beak.
- He is up before the ERC beak tomorrow and, if found guilty, is likely to be suspended for at least a month.
- McLean resigned as a director of the club on Thursday, a move which spares him an appearance before the beaks at Hampden as he has still to be held to account for an incident involving a BBC reporter.
- And those sent down will be told by the beak: ‘I have no choice but to deliberately de-liberate you.’
- If I ever find myself up in front of the beak (presumably on a charge of teenage arson) I'd like this guy to defend me.
Origin
Late 18th century: probably from criminals' slang.