magpie
/ˈmaɡpʌɪ
/noun
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.
- Long-eared Owls usually nest in abandoned stick nests, often the nests of magpies, crows, ravens, or hawks.
- The brain-to-body ratio of crows, ravens and magpies equals that of dolphins and nearly matches humans.
2 (also bell magpie) Any 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.
- 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 magpie [as modifier]: he would carry these documents home to appease his secretive magpie instinct...
- The Eameses were magpie collectors of Americana - toys, tools, quilts, cotton reels, primitive paintings - and this love affair shines through their short films.
- They are very far from being traditional; they are magpie collectors of everything that might suit them, and that includes rhetoric.
- 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.