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oscine love

oscine

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various passerine birds of the suborder Passeri (formerly Oscines); a songbird.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of or pertaining to the Oscines: applied to those Passeres which are acromyodian and to their type of structure: as, an oscine bird; an oscine syrinx. Also oscinine, oscinian.
  • noun An oscine bird; a member of the Oscines.
  • noun A crystalline alkaloid, C8H13O2N, found in crude belladonine and also made from other alkaloids. It melts at 110° C. Also called pseudatropine, scopoline, and oxytropine.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Zoöl.) Relating to the Oscines.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Pertaining to songbirds

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun passerine bird having specialized vocal apparatus
  • adjective of or relating to the songbirds

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From New Latin Oscinēs, former suborder name, from Latin oscinēs, pl. of oscen, bird used in augury; see kan- in Indo-European roots.]

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Examples

  • Plenty of parrots and hummingbirds do, and likewise many of what are called oscine songbirds, including the warblers, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes and so on.

    Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2008

  • Plenty of parrots and hummingbirds do, and likewise many of what are called oscine songbirds, including the warblers, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes and so on.

    Science News / Features, Blog Entries, Column Entries, Issues, News Items and Book Reviews 2008

  • For that matter, however, there is no one of our birds -- be he, in technical language, "oscine" or "non-oscine" -- whose voice is not, in its own way, agreeable.

    Birds in the Bush Bradford Torrey 1877

  • Bush warblers are particularly newsworthy right now (to my mind at any rate) given that the just-published oscine supertree of Jønsson & Fjeldså (2006) found Cettia to be diphyletic, with C. cetti grouping with the tesias* and Urosphena (the stubtails) while the Japanese bush warbler C. diphone grouped with the Broad-billed flycatcher-warbler Tickellia hodgsoni and Orthotomus (the tailorbirds).

    Archive 2006-05-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • A phylogenetic supertree of oscine passerine birds (Aves: Passeri).

    Archive 2006-05-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • It was something after the order of the purple martin's melodious sputter, only the tones were richer and fuller and the music better defined, as became a genuine oscine.

    Birds of the Rockies 1896

  • When considering the perching birds oscine and suboscine the team found that despite having northern ancestral origins, 55% of New World oscine species now breed in South America, many of them in tropical habitats.

    Spero News 2010

  • Thus, our study has revealed more than 200 annotated and unique genes that have not been previously detected in the context of the oscine song system.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Peter V. Lovell et al. 2008

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