gull
/ˈɡʌl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.00 in modern English
5
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any of various pierid butterflies of the genus Cepora.
Example Sentences
- "The tide was out, and we drew up amid the strong bracing smell of seaweed, with gulls screeching, wheeling around, and gliding on the wind."
- "Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight—how to get from shore to food and back again.[…]For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight."
- "BENEDICK. [Aside] I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it: knavery cannot, sure, hide itself in such reverence."
- "You'll excuse me, sir, but as you are fresh, take care to avoid the gulls; they fly about here in large flocks, I assure you, and do no little mischief at times." "I never understood that gulls were birds of prey," said I.—"Only in Oxford, sir; and here, I assure you, they bite like hawks, and pick many a poor young gentleman as bare before his three years are expired, as the crows would a dead sheep upon a common. […]""
- "O, but to ha' gulled him / Had been a mastery."
- "The vulgar, gulled into rebellion, armed."
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English gulle, from a Brythonic language (compare Breton gouelan, Welsh gwylan, and Cornish golan), from Proto-Brythonic *gwuɨlann, from Proto-Celtic *weilannā (“seagull”). Cognate with Old Irish foílenn, Scottish Gaelic faoileag. Compare French goéland, a borrowing from Breton. Eclipsed Middle English lare (borrowed from Latin larus) and Middle English mewe (from Old English mæw).