"thornback" meaning in English

See thornback in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: thornbacks [plural]
Etymology: From Middle English thornbak; equivalent to thorn + back. Etymology templates: {{inh|en|enm|thornbak}} Middle English thornbak, {{compound|en|thorn|back}} thorn + back Head templates: {{en-noun}} thornback (plural thornbacks)
  1. Any animal with a thorny back, especially marine animals, such as:
    The thornback guitarfish (Platyrhinoidis triseriata), a species of ray in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean.
    Categories (lifeform): Rays and skates
    Sense id: en-thornback-en-noun-vfhfj1Sm Disambiguation of Rays and skates: 29 35 33 4 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 41 41 10 8 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 47 34 10 9
  2. Any animal with a thorny back, especially marine animals, such as:
    The thornback ray or thornback skate (Raja clavata), a species of ray in the Atlantic Ocean.
    Categories (lifeform): Rays and skates
    Sense id: en-thornback-en-noun-KUdu7vCt Disambiguation of Rays and skates: 29 35 33 4 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 41 41 10 8
  3. Any animal with a thorny back, especially marine animals, such as:
    The thornback skate (Dentiraja lemprieri), a fish endemic to Australia.
    Categories (lifeform): Rays and skates
    Sense id: en-thornback-en-noun-ZhviJ8Jy Disambiguation of Rays and skates: 29 35 33 4
  4. (archaic) A woman over a certain age (variously 26 or 30) who has never married, older than a spinster. Tags: archaic
    Sense id: en-thornback-en-noun-h073xi-V

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for thornback meaning in English (4.2kB)

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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1710, Isaac Bickerstaff (pseudonym), A Good husband for five shillings, or Esquire Bickerstaff's Lottery, quoted in 2016, Amy M. Froide, Silent Partners: Women As Public Investors During Britain's Financial Revolution, 1690-1750, Oxford University Press, page 46",
          "text": "[A] society of honest gentlemen [is holding a lottery] for the benefit of all single ladies, widows, maids, or thornbacks […]"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1920, Anna Mary Galbraith, The Family and the New Democracy: A Study in Social Hygiene, page 184",
          "text": "Spinsters. — In a society where marriages were formed very early, girls often wedding at sixteen or under, […] At the age of thirty a spinster was called a \"thornback ,” but bachelors and thornbacks were not the only people who […]",
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          "ref": "2009, Suzy Witten, The Afflicted Girls, page 131",
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          "ref": "1920, Anna Mary Galbraith, The Family and the New Democracy: A Study in Social Hygiene, page 184",
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  "word": "thornback"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.